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Is
Praeterita
VOL. I
By
John Ruskin
;<
I
London : George Allen
WITH FRONTISPIECE AND
TWO FACSIMILES
SJLi
May 1907
IZth io iSth Thousand
All rights reserved
PREFACE.
I HAVE written these sketches of effort and
incident in former years for my friends ; and
for those of the public who have been pleased
by my books.
I have written them therefore, frankly,
garrulously, and at ease; speaking of what
it gives me joy to remember at any length I
like — sometimes very carefully of what I think
it may be useful for others to know; and
passing in total silence things which I have
no pleasure in reviewing, and which the reader
would find no help in the account of. My
described life has thus become more amusing
than I expected to myself, as I summoned its
long past scenes for present scrutiny : — its
main methods of study, and principles of
work, I feel justified in commending to other
students; and very certainly any habitual
readers of my books will understand them
Vi PREFACE.
better, for having knowledge as complete as
I can give them of the personal character
which, without endeavour to conceal, I yet
have never taken pains to display, and even,
now and then, felt some freakish pleasure in
exposing to the chance of misinterpretation.
I write these few prefatory words on my
father's birthday, in what was once my
nursery in his old house, — to which he
brought my mother and me, sixty-two years
since, I being then four years old. What
would otherwise in the following pages have
been little more than an old man's recreation
in gathering visionary flowers in fields of
youth, has taken, as I wrote, the nobler
aspect of a dutiful offering at the grave of
parents who trained my childhood to all the
good it could attain, and whose memory makes
declining life cheerful in the hope of being
soon again with them.
Herne Hill,
loth May, 18S5.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
[Note. — The Tables of Contents which are now added to this
edition of " Preeterita" have been prepared by the compiler of
the Index. The dates at the head of each chapter are those with
which the chapter mainly deals, although other topics, referring
to later years, are often included in the same chapter.']
PAGE
Preface v
CHAPTER 1.
THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL.
1819-24.
Author's first masters— Scott and Homer— Defoe and
Bunyan— The Bible— His Toryism— Idle kingship—
Hisfather's business— Author born at 54 Hunter Street,
Brunswick Square— Early travels through England —
Maternal grandparents— His mother— Her sister at
Croydon— Author's childhood— Toys and amusements
— Portrait by Northcote - Dress — Learns to read and
write— Destined for the Church— His own sermon
"People, be good!" — His father's partners— Mr.
Domecq — Mr. Henry Telford — Gives author Rogers'
Italy — His travelling chariot — Nurse Anne — Tra-
velling in olden days — Cottages and castles . . 1-34
CHAPTER II.
HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS.
1824-26.
Removal to Heme Hill — The house and neighbourhood
described — Pleasures of author's childhood — His
Vlll CONTENTS.
PAGE
father's manner of life— Reading aloud — Bible and
Latin lessons with his mother — Home blessings —
Peace, obedience, faith — Analytical power — Home
deficiencies — No one to love : nothing to endure —
Untrained manners — Want of independent action —
General effect on author's character — " Prseterita"
to be amiable— Heme Hill then and now further
described — Its garden ...... 35-62
CHAPTER III.
THE BANKS OK TAY.
1826-28.
Author's powers as a child — Early reading and writing
— First efforts in authorship — "Harry and Lucy" —
Poems on steam-engine and rainbow — Daily routine
— Love of toy bricks — Modern toys — Interest in
Mowers — " Eudosia, a Poem on the Universe" —
Mineralogy — Evenings at home — His father reading
aloud — Paternal grandparents — His father's sister
Jessie — Her home at Perth — Her servant Mause —
Her children — By the banks of Tay — Accidents of
childhood — A dog's bite — A good ducking . . 63-92
CHAPTER IV.
UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS.
1828-34.
Illness at Dunkeld (1828) — Death of cousin Jessie -and
her mother — Foresight dreams — Author's cousin
Mary, adopted by his parents (1829) — Sundays in
childhood — Dr. Andrews of Beresford Chapel —
Author's first tutor — Greek lessons — Copying Cruik-
shank's Grimm — Cousin Mary— Matlock (1829)
and mineralogy — Author's poem " Iteriad" (1830-32)
CONTENTS. IX
PAGE
— First drawing master, Mr. Runciman (1831) —
Author's first sketch book — Love of watching the
sea— 1832 — At Heme Hill — Gift of Rogers' Italy —
1833 — Prout's sketches in Flanders and Germany
— Tour abroad — Author's drawings there — Poetical
journal (1834) — Author's schoolmaster, Rev. T. Dale
— Schoolfellows, Matson, Key, Jones — Author's
Scotch grammar — Mr. Rowbotham and mathematics
— Author (1834) gets leave to copy in the Louvre 93-117
CHAPTER V.
PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON.
1829-35.
Death of author's Croydon aunt — Her family — Careers of
her sons — Charles at Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. —
Annuals — Forget-me-not — Friendship's offering — Mr.
Pringle — Prints author's verses — Takes him to see
S. Rogers — The Ettrick Shepherd — Visits to Clifton,
Bristol, Chepstow, Malvern — The English Lakes
— Tour in Wales — Plynlimmon — Riding lessons —
Mineralogy— Dr. Grant— Mr. and Mrs. Richard Gray
— Mr. and Mrs. Cockburn and their sons— Marryat's
novels— The field of Waterloo .... 118-145
CHAPTER VI.
SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN.
1833.
Paris 1823— Author's recollection of his visit there and to
Brussels— Nanny Clowsley— Travelling chariots in old
days— "Vix ea nostra voco"— French post-horses-
Couriers— Salvador— Author's father, his expenditure
and habits in travelling— Schaffhausen 1833— The
Black Forest— The gates of the hills— William Tell—
VOL. I. f,
CONTENTS.
PAGE
First sight of the Alps — Into Italy by the Splugen —
The Lake of Como — Milan — Modern electro-plate
tourists — What went ye out for to see? . . 146-171
CHAPTER VII.
PAPA AND MAMMA.
1834.
Author's occupations — Poetry without ideas — Engraving
— Architecture without design — Geology — Character
of his parents — His father's reading aloud — His
mother's birth and education — His father's youth —
Letter (1807) of Dr. Thomas Brown to him — His
parents' nine years' engagement — Their marriage —
Author's ignorance of his family affairs — His mother's
self-culture — His father's health — Business powers and
position — Commercial guests at Heme Hill — Secluded
and simple life there — Dr. Andrews of Walworth —
Offices of Ruskin, Telford, and Domecq — Maisie —
Love of home — Death of Cousin Charles at sea
(Jan. 22, 1834) 172-204
CHAPTER VIII.
VESTER, CAMENAE.
1835-
Heme Hill friends — Mr. and Mrs. Fall and their son
Richard — Author's reading — The Annuals — Byron
read aloud to him by his father — His mother's puri-
tanism, inoffensive prudery, and humour — Byron's
true qualities — Remarks on his letters to Moore about
Sheridan, and to Murray about poetry — Author's early
but limited appreciation of him and of Pope's Homer
— Byron's simple truth — His rhythm — Johnson's influ-
ence on author — Author's illness, 1835 — Dr. Walsh-
man — Preparations for tour abroad — Cyanometer —
Poetical diary 205-229
I
CONTENTS. XI
CHAPTER IX.
THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE.
1835-
PAGE
Abbeville — Its history — St. Riquier — St. Wulfran —
Author's thought centres ; Rouen, Geneva, Pisa — His
love of Abbeville — Paris to Geneva in old days — La
Cloche, Dijon, Auxonne, Dole — Poligny — Jura —
Champagnole — Saussure's description — The source of
the Orbe — Carlyle quoted on gardens — Les Rousses —
Col de la Faucille— Effect on author, 1835 . . 230-256
CHAPTER X.
QUEM TU, MELPOMENE.
1836.
Author's taste for music — Anecdote of him at Tunbridge
Wells (1827) — His father's choice of his clerks — Henry
Watson and his sisters — Their musical gifts — Mr.
Domecq's daughters and home in Paris — The opera
there — " I Puritani" — Grisi andMalibran — Taglioni —
Patti — Author's music and singing lessons at Oxford
(1837) — Mr. Dale's lectures at King's College (1836)
— Visit of the Domecq girls to Heme Hill — Adele
Domecq — Author's story of "Leoni" — His Venetian
tragedy — Reading Byron and Shelley — Matriculation
at Christ Church (1836) — Entered as a gentleman
commoner — Dean Gaisford — Going into residence 257-287
CHAPTER XI.
CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR.
I S3 7-
First days at Oxford — Author's inclinations and character
— His reading and view of the Bible — Christ Church
Cathedral — The occupants of the choir — The Hall,
Xll CONTENTS.
PAGE
degraded by "collections " — Dean Gaisford — Flooring
a tutor — Too good an essay — Mr. Strangways' approval
— Henry Acland — Osborne Gordon — Charles Newton
— Author's mother living in Oxford — The day's routine
— The tutors — Walter Brown — Messrs. Hill, Kynas-
ton, Hussey — Dr. Pusey — The Dean again — A bright
exception — DeanLiddell — Dr. Bucklandandhisfamily
— H. Acland's friendship — Story of his calmness in a
shipwreck — Author's debt to him and Dr. Buckland —
Lord Wemyss (F. Charteris) — Lord Desart — Oxford
wines — Bob Grimston — Scott Murray — Lord Kildare
— Thucydides — Dr. Arnold's preface quoted 288-324
CHAPTER XII.
ROSLYN CHAPEL.
I837-39-
Copley Fielding — Author's drawing-lessons from him —
A letter from Northcote (1830) — Author's knowledge
of Turner (1836) — Turner's pictures of that year —
Author's reply to Blackwood — Turner's letter to him
on it — Mr. Munro of Novar — Tours in Yorkshire and
the Lakes (1837), Scotland (1838), Cornwall (1839)
— Author's peculiar love of wild scenery — Words-
worth, Shelley, and Turner — Author's feelings com-
bine theirs, and are still unchanged — Mr. and Mrs.
Withers and their daughter — Loch Katrine — Roslyn
and Melrose — "The Poetry of Architecture" (1837-38)
— Influence of Johnson — Mr. Ritchie — Adele again —
Disobedience of wishing to disobey — Miss Wardell —
Miss S. Dowie 3 2 S~35 3
PRETERIT A.
CHAPTER I.
THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL.
[ The reader must be advised that the first two chapters are
reprinted, with slight revision, from Fors Clavigera,
having beeti written there chiefly for the political lessons,
which appear now introduced somewhat violently.]
I. I AM, and my father was before me, a vio-
lent Tory of the old school ; — Walter Scott's
school, that is to say, and Homer's. I name
these two out of the numberless great Tory
writers, because they were my own two masters.
I had Walter Scott's novels and the Iliad,
(Pope's translation,) for constant reading when
I was a child, on week-days : on Sunday their
effect was tempered by Robinson Crusoe and the
Pilgrim's Progress ; my mother having it deeply
in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman
of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evan-
gelical than my mother ; and my aunt gave me
VOL. I. A
2 PR^F.TERITA.
cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, which — as I
much preferred it hot — greatly diminished the
influence of the Pilgrim's Progress, and the
end of the matter was, that I got all the noble
imaginative teaching of Defoe and Bunyan, and
yet — am not an evangelical clergyman.
yj 2. I had, however, still better teaching than
theirs, and that compulsorily, and every day of
the week.
Walter Scott and Pope's Homer were read-
ing of my own election, and my mother forced
me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters
of the Bible by heart ; as well as to read it
every syllable through, aloud, hard names and
all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once
a year : and to that discipline — patient, accu-
rate, and resolute — I owe, not only a know-
ledge of the book, which I find occasionally
serviceable, but much of my general power of
taking pains, and the best part of my taste
in literature. From Walter Scott's novels I
might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to
other people's novels ; and Pope might, per-
haps, have led me to take Johnson's English,
or Gibbon's, as types of language; but, once
knowing the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 1 19th
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 3
Psalm, the 15 th of 1st Corinthians, the Ser-
mon on the Mount, and most of the Apoca-
lypse, every syllable by heart, and having
always a way of thinking with myself what
words meant, it was not possible for me, even
in the foolishest times of youth, to write
entirely superficial or formal English ; and the
affectation of trying to write like Hooker and
George Herbert was the most innocent I could
have fallen into.
3. From my own chosen masters, then,
Scott and Homer, I learned the Toryism
which my best after-thought has only served
to confirm.
That is to sa}', a most sincere love of kings,
and dislike of everybody who attempted to
disobey them. Only, both by Homer and
Scott, I was taught strange ideas about kings,
which I find for the present much obsolete;
for, I perceived that both the author of the
Iliad and the author of Waverley made their
kings, or king-loving persons, do harder work
than anybody else. Tydides or Idomeneus
always killed twenty Trojans to other people's
one, and Redgauntlet speared more salmon
than any of the Solway fishermen, and —
4 PR^TERITA.
which was particularly a subject of admiration
to me — I observed that they not only did
more, but in proportion to their doings, got
less than other people — nay, that the best of
them were even ready to govern for nothing !
and let their followers divide any quantity of
spoil or profit. Of late it has seemed to me
that the idea of a king has become exactly
the contrary of this, and that it has been
supposed the duty of superior persons gene-
rally to govern less, and get more, than any-
body else. So that it was, perhaps, quite as
well that in those early days my contemplation
of existent kingship was a very distant one.
4. The aunt who gave me cold mutton on
Sundays was my father's sister: she lived at
Bridge-end, in the town of Perth, and had
a garden full of gooseberry-bushes, sloping
down to the Tay, with a door opening to the
water, which ran past it, clear-brown over
the pebbles three or four feet deep; swift-
eddying, — an infinite thing for a child to look
down into.
5. My father began business as a wine-
merchant, with no capital, and a consider-
able amount of debts bequeathed him by my
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 5
grandfather. He accepted the bequest, and
paid them all before he began to lay by any-
thing for himself, — for which his best friends
called him a fool, and I, without expressing
any opinion as to his wisdom, which I knew
in such matters to be at least equal to mine,
have written on the granite slab over his grave
that he was 'an entirely honest merchant.'
As days went on he was able to take a house
in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, No. 54,
(the windows of it, fortunately for me, com-
manded a view of a marvellous iron post, out
of which the water-carts were filled through
beautiful little trap-doors, by pipes like boa-
constrictors ; and I was never weary of con-
templating that mystery, and the delicious
dripping consequent); and as years went on,
and I came to be four or five years old, he
could command a postchaise and pair for two
months in the summer, by help of which, with
my mother and me, he went the round of his
country customers (who liked to see the
principal of the house his own traveller) ; so
that, at a jog-trot pace, and through the pano-
ramic opening of the four windows of a post-
chaise, made more panoramic still to me
6 PR^ETERITA.
because my seat was a little bracket in front,
(for we used to hire the chaise regularly for
the two months out of Long Acre, and so
could have it bracketed and pocketed as we
liked,) I saw all the high-roads, and most of
the cross ones, of England and Wales, and
great part of lowland Scotland, as far as
Perth, where every other year we spent the
whole summer; and I used to read the Abbot
at Kinross, and the Monastery in Glen Farg,
which I confused with ' Glendearg/ and
thought that the White Lady had as certainly
lived by the streamlet in that glen of the
Ochils, as the Queen of Scots in the island of
Loch Leven.
v 6. To my farther great benefit, as I grew
older, I thus saw nearly all the noblemen's
houses in England j in reverent and healthy
delight of uncovetous admiration, — perceiving,
as soon as I could perceive any political truth
at all, that it was probably much happier to
live in a small house, and have Warwick
Castle to be astonished at, than to live in
Warwick Castle and have nothing to be
astonished at ; but that, at all events, it would
not make Brunswick Square in the least more
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 7
pleasantly habitable, to pull Warwick Castle
down. And at this day, though I have kind
invitations enough to visit America, I could
not, even for a couple of months, live in a
country so miserable as to possess no castles.
7. Nevertheless, having formed my notion
of kinghood chiefly from the Fitzjames of the
Lady of the Lake, and of noblesse from the
Douglas there, and the Douglas in Marmion,
a painful wonder soon arose in my child-mind,
why the castles should now be always empty.
Tantallon was there; but no Archibald of
Angus: — Stirling, but no Knight of Snow-
doun. The galleries and gardens of England
were beautiful to see — but his Lordship and
her Ladyship were always in town, said the
housekeepers and gardeners. Deep yearning /
took hold of me for a kind of ' Restoration,'
which I began slowly to feel that Charles the
Second had not altogether effected, though I
always wore a gilded oak-apple very piously
in my button-hole on the 29th of May. It
seemed to me that Charles the Second's
Restoration had been, as compared with the
Restoration I wanted, much as that gilded
oak-apple to a real apple. And as I grew
5 PRiETERlTA.
wiser, the desire for sweet pippins instead of
bitter ones, and Living Kings instead of dead
ones, appeared to me rational as well as
romantic ; and gradually it has become the
main purpose of my life to grow pippins, and
its chief hope, to see Kings. *
8. I have never been able to trace these
prejudices to any royalty of descent : of my
father's ancestors I know nothing, nor of my
mother's more than that my maternal grand-
mother was the landlady of the Old King's
Head in Market Street, Croydon ; and I wish
she were alive again, and I could paint her
Simone Memmi's King's Head, for a sign.
My maternal grandfather was, as I have
said, a sailor, who used to embark, like Robin-
son Crusoe, at Yarmouth, and come back at
rare intervals, making himself very delightful
at home. I have an idea he had something to
do with the herring business, but am not clear
on that point ; my mother never being much
communicative concerning it. He spoiled her,
* The St. George's Company was founded for the pro-
motion of agricultural instead of town life : and my only
hope of prosperity for England, or any other country, in
whatever life they lead, is in their discovering and obeying
men capable of Kinghood.
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 9
and her (younger) sister, with all his heart,
when he was at home ; unless there appeared
any tendency to equivocation, or imaginative
statements, on the part of the children, which
were always unforgiveable. My mother being
once perceived by him to have distinctly told
him a lie, he sent the servant out forthwith to
buy an entire bundle of new broom twigs to
whip her with. 'They did not hurt me so
much as one' (twig) 'would have done,' said
my mother, ' but I thought a good deal of it.'
9. My grandfather was killed at two-and-
thirty, by trying to ride, instead of walk, into
Croydon ; he got his leg crushed by his horse
against a wall ; and died of the hurt's morti-
fying. My mother was then seven or eight
years old, and, with her sister, was sent to
quite a fashionable (for Croydon) day-school,
Mrs. Rice's, where my mother was taught
evangelical principles, and became the pattern
girl and best needlewoman in the school ; and
where my aunt absolutely refused evan-
gelical principles, and became the plague and
pet of it.
10. My mother, being a girl of great power,
with not a little pride, grew more and more
I O PRiETERITA.
exemplary in her entirely conscientious career,
much laughed at, though much beloved, by
her sister; who had more wit, less pride, and
no conscience. At last my mother, formed
into a consummate housewife, was sent for to
Scotland to take care of my paternal grand-
father's house ; who was gradually ruining
himself; and who at last effectually ruined,
and killed, himself. My father came up to
London ; was a clerk in a merchant's house for
nine years, without a holiday ; then began busi-
ness on his own account; paid his father's debts;
and married his exemplary Croydon cousin.
II. Meantime my aunt had remained in
Croydon, and married a baker. By the time I
was four years old, and beginning to recollect
things, — my father rapidly taking higher
commercial position in London, — there was
traceable — though to me, as a child, wholly
incomprehensible, — just the least possible
shade of shyness on the part of Hunter Street,
Brunswick Square, towards Market Street,
Croydon. But whenever my father was ill, —
and hard work and sorrow had already set
their mark on him, — we all went down to
Croydon to be petted by my homely aunt ;
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. I I
and walk on Duppas Hill, and on the heather
of Addington.
12. My aunt lived in the little house still
standing — or which was so four months ago —
the fashionablest in Market Street, having
actually two windows over the shop, in the
second story; but I never troubled myself
about that superior part of the mansion,
unless my father happened to be making
drawings in Indian ink, when I would sit
reverently by and watch ; my chosen domains
being, at all other times, the shop, the bake-
house, and the stones round the spring of
crystal water at the back door (long since let
down into the modern sewer) ; and my chief
companion, my aunt's dog, Towzer, whom she
had taken pity on when he was a snappish,
starved vagrant ; and made a brave and affec-
tionate dog of : which was the kind of thing
she did for every living creature that came in
her way, all her life long.
13. Contented, by help of these occasional
glimpses of the rivers of Paradise, I lived
until I was more than four years old in
Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater
part of the year ; for a few weeks in the
I 2 PR^TERITA.
summer breathing country air by taking lodg-
ings in small cottages (real cottages, not
villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or
at Dulwich, at 'Mrs. Ridley's,' the last of a
row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich
fields on one side, and was itself full of butter-
cups in spring, and blackberries in autumn.
But my chief remaining impressions of those
days are attached to Hunter Street. ( My
mother's general principles of first treatment
were, to guard me with steady watchfulness
from all avoidable pain or danger ; and, for
the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked,
provided I was neither fretful nor trouble-
some. But the law was, that I should find
my own amusement. No toys of any kind
were at first allowed ; — and the pity of my
Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in
this respect was boundless. On one of my
birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother's
resolution by splendour of temptation, she
bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she
could find in all the Soho bazaar — as big as a
real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet
and gold, and that would dance, tied to the
leg of a chair. I must have been greatly
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. I 3
impressed, for I remember well the look of the
two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their
virtues. My mother was obliged to accept
them; but afterwards quietly told me it was
not right that I should have them ; and I
never saw them again.
14. Nor did I painfully wish, what I was
never permitted for an instant to hope, or even
imagine, the possession of such things as one
saw in toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to
play with, as long as I was capable only of
pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I
grew older, I had a cart, and a ball ; and when
I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-
cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but,
I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and
being always summarily whipped if I cried,
did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the
stairs, I soon attained serene and secure
methods of life and motion ; and could pass
my days contentedly in tracing the squares
and comparing the colours of my carpet ;— .
examining the knots in the wood of the floor,
or counting the bricks in the opposite houses ;
with rapturous intervals of excitement during
the filling of the water - cart, through its
1 4 PR^TERITA.
leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post
at the pavement edge; or the still more
admirable proceedings of the turncock, when
he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up
in the middle of the street. But the carpet,
and what patterns I could find in bed covers,
dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were
my chief resources, and my attention to the
particulars in these was soon so accurate,
that when at three and a half I was taken to
have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote,
I had not been ten minutes alone with him
before I asked him why there were holes in
his carpet.^ The portrait in question represents
a very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed
in a white frock like a girl, with a broad light-
blue sash and blue shoes to match ; the feet
of the child wholesomely large in proportion
to its bod}' ; and the shoes still more whole-
somely large in proportion to the feet.
15. These articles of my daily dress were
all sent to the old painter for perfect reali-
zation ; but they appear in the picture more
remarkable than they were in my nursery,
because I am represented as running in a
field at the edge of a wood with the trunks
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. I $ (
of its trees striped across in the manner of
Sir Joshua Reynolds; while two rounded
hills, as blue as my shoes, appear in the
distance, which were put in by the painter
at my own request ; for I had already been
once, if not twice, taken to Scotland ; and
my Scottish nurse having always sung to me
as we approached the Tweed or Esk, —
' For Scotland, my darling, lies full in thy view,
With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,'
the idea of distant hills was connected in my
mind with approach to the extreme felicities
of life, in my Scottish aunt's garden of goose-
berry bushes, sloping to the Tay. But that,
when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little
thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so ex-
plicit) what I would like to have in the distance
of my picture, I should have said ' blue hills '
instead of ' gooseberry bushes,' appears to me
— and I think without any morbid tendency
to think over-much of myself — a fact suffi-
ciently curious, and not without promise, in
a child of that age.
16. I think it should be related also that
having, as aforesaid, been steadily whipped
1 6 PR^ETERITA.
if I was troublesome, my formed habit of
serenity was greatly pleasing to the old
painter ; for I sat contentedly motionless,
counting the holes in his carpet, or watching
him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,
— a beautiful operation, indeed, to my think-
ing ; — but I do not remember taking any
interest in Mr. Northcote's application of
the pigments to the canvas ; my ideas of
delightful art, in that respect, involving in-
dispensably the possession of a large pot,
filled with paint of the brightest green, and
of a brush which would come out of it soppy.
But my quietude was so pleasing to the old
man that he begged my father and mother to
let me sit to him for the face of a child which
he was painting in a classical subject ; where
I was accordingly represented as reclining on
a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out
of my foot by a wild man of the woods.
17. In all these particulars, I think the
treatment, or accidental conditions, of my
childhood, entirely right, for a child of my
temperament : but the mode of my introduc-
tion to literature appears to me questionable,
and T am not prepared to carry it out in St.
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. \J
George's schools, without much modification.
I absolutely declined to learn to read by
syllables; but would get an entire sentence
by heart with great facility, and point with
accuracy to every word in the page as I
repeated it. As, however, when the words
were once displaced, I had no more to say,
my mother gave up, for the time, the en-
deavour to teach me to read, hoping only
that I might consent, in process of years, to
adopt the popular system of syllabic study.
But I went on to amuse myself, in my own
way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did
patterns; and at five years old was sending
for my 'second volumes' to the circulating
library.
1 8. This effort to learn the words in their
collective aspect, was assisted by my real
admiration of the look of printed type,
which I began to copy for my pleasure^
ns other children draw dogs and horses.
The following inscription, facsimiled from
the fly-leaf of my Seven Champions of
Christendom, (judging from the independent
views taken in it of the character of the
letter L, and the relative elevation of G ) I
vol. i. ' J
18
PR.ETERITA.
believe to be an extremely early art study
of this class ; and as by the will of Fors,
the first lines of the note, written after an
interval of fifty years, underneath my copy
of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented
>W2 jvbusVo'.W- u*fc ^\oo\^ aV \A <Sax-vn£ hero
some notable points of correspondence with
it, I thought it well he should engrave them
together, as they stood.
^ 19. My mother had, as she afterwards told
me, solemnly ' devoted me to God ' before I
was born : in imitation of Hannah.
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDKL. 1 9
Very good women are remarkably apt to
make away with their children prematurely,
in this manner : the real meaning of the pious
act being, that, as the sons of Zebedee are
not (or at least they hope not), to sit on the
right and left of Christ, in His kingdom, their
own sons may perhaps, they think, in time
be advanced to that respectable position in
eternal life ; especially if they ask Christ very
humbly for it every day; and they always
forget in the most naive way that the position
is not His to give !
20. ' Devoting me to God,' meant, as far as
my mother knew herself what she meant, that
she would try to send me to college, and make
a clergyman of me: and I was accordingly
bred for ' the Church.' My father, who— rest
be to his soul — had the exceedingly bad habit
of yielding to my mother in large things and
taking his own way in little ones, allowed me,
without saying a word, to be thus withdrawn
from the sherry trade as an unclean thing;
not without some pardonable participation in
my mother's ultimate views for me. For
many and many a year afterwards, I re-
member, while he was speaking to one of
20 PRJETERITA.
our artist friends, who admired Raphael, and
greatly regretted my endeavours to interfere
with that popular taste, — while my father and
he were condoling with each other on my
having been impudent enough to think I could
tell the public about Turner and Raphael, —
instead of contenting myself, as I ought, with
explaining the way of their souls' salvation to
them — and what an amiable clergyman was
lost in me, — ' Yes,' said my father, with tears
in his eyes — (true and tender tears, as ever
father shed,) ' he would have been a Bishop.'
21. Luckily for me, my mother, under these
distinct impressions of her own duty, and
with such latent hopes of my future eminence,
took me very early to church ; — where, in
spite of my quiet habits, and my mother's
golden vinaigrette, alwa} r s indulged to me
there, and there only, with its lid unclasped
that I might see the wreathed open pattern
above the sponge, I found the bottom of the
pew so extremely dull a place to keep quiet in,
(my best story-books being also taken away
from me in the morning,) that, as I have
somewhere said before, the horror of Sunday
used even to cast its prescient gloom as far
.
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 2 I
back in the week as Friday — and all the glory
of Monday, with church seven days removed
again, was no equivalent for it.
22. Notwithstanding, I arrived at some
abstract in my own mind of the Rev. Mr.
Howell's sermons ; and occasionally, in imita-
tion of him, preached a sermon at home over
the red sofa cushions ; — this performance being
always called for by my mother's dearest
friends, as the great accomplishment of my
childhood. The sermon was, I believe, some
eleven words long ; very exemplary, it seems
to me, in that respect — and I still think must
have been the purest gospel, for I know it
began with, ' People, be good.'
23. We seldom had company, even on week
days ; and I was never allowed to come down
to dessert, until much later in life — when I
was able to crack nuts neatly. I was then
permitted to come down to crack other people's
nuts for them — (I hope they liked the minis-
tration) — but never to have any myself; nor
anything else of dainty kind, either then or
at other times. Once at Hunter Street, I
recollect my mother giving me three raisins,
in the forenoon, out of the store cabinet ; and
2 2 PRJETERITA.
I remember perfectly the first time I tasted
custard, in our lodgings in Norfolk Street —
where we had gone while the house was being
painted, or cleaned, or something. My father
was dining in the front room, and did not
finish his custard ; and my mother brought
me the bottom of it into the back room.
24. But for the reader's better understanding
of such further progress of my poor little life
as I may trespass on his patience in describ-
ing, it is now needful that I give some account
of my father's mercantile position in London.
The firm of which he was head partner
may be yet remembered by some of the older
city houses, as carrying on their business in
a small counting-house on the first floor of
narrow premises, in as narrow a thoroughfare
of East London, — Billiter Street, the principal
traverse from Leadenhall Street into Fen-
church Street.
The names of the three partners were given
in full on their brass plate under the counting-
house bell, — Ruskin, Telford, and Domecq.
25. Mr. Domecq's name should have been
the first, by rights, for my father and Mr.
Telford were only his agents. He was the
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 2 3
sole proprietor of the estate which was the
main capital of the firm, — the vineyard of
Macharnudo, the most precious hillside, for
growth of white wine, in the Spanish penin-
sula. The quality of the Macharnudo vin-
tage essentially fixed the standard of Xeres
'sack,' or 'dry' — secco — sherris, or sherry,
from the days of Henry the Fifth to our own ;
— the unalterable and unrivalled chalk-marl of
it putting a strength into the grape which age
can only enrich and darken, — never impair.
26. Mr. Peter Domecq was, I believe, Spanish
born ; and partly French, partly English bred ;
a man of strictest honour, and kindly dis-
position ; how descended, I do not know ;
how he became possessor of his vineyard, I
do not know ; what position he held, when
young, in the firm of Gordon, Murphy, and
Company, I do not know; but in their house
he watched their head clerk, my father, during
his nine years of duty, and when the house
broke up, asked him to be his own agent in
England. My father saw that he could fully
trust Mr. Domecq's honour, and feeling ; — but
not so fully either his sense, or his industry;
and insisted, though taking only his agent's
24 PR^ETERITA.
commission, on being both nominally, and
practically, the head-partner of the firm.
27. Mr. Domecq lived chiefly in Paris ;
rarely visiting his Spanish estate, but having
perfect knowledge of the proper processes of
its cultivation, and authority over its labourers
almost like a chief's over his clan. He kept
the wines at the highest possible standard ;
and allowed my father to manage all matters
concerning their sale, as he thought best.
The . second partner, Mr. Henry Telford,
brought into the business what capital was
necessary for its London branch. The pre-
mises in Billiter Street belonged to him ;
and he had a pleasant country house at
Widmore, near Bromley ; a quite far-away
Kentish village in those days.
He was a perfect type of an English country
gentleman of moderate fortune; unmarried,
living with three unmarried sisters, — who, in
the refinement of their highly educated, un-
pretending, benevolent, and felicitous lives,
remain in my memory more like the figures
in a beautiful story than realities. Neither
in story, nor in reality, have I ever again
heard of, or seen, anything like Mr. Henry
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 2$
Telford ; — so gentle, so humble, so affectionate,
so clear in common sense, so fond of horses,
— and so entirely incapable of doing, thinking,
or saying, anything that had the slightest
taint in it of the racecourse or the stable.
28. Yet I believe he never missed any great
race; passed the greater part of his life on
horseback; and hunted during the whole
Leicestershire season ; but never made a bet,
never had a serious fall, and never hurt a
horse. Between him and my father there
was absolute confidence, and the utmost
friendship that could exist without com-
munity of pursuit. My father was greatly
proud of Mr. Telford's standing among the
country gentlemen; and Mr. Telford was
affectionately respectful to my father's steady
industry and infallible commercial instinct.
Mr. Telford's actual part in the conduct of
the business was limited to attendance in
the counting-house during two months at
Midsummer, when my father took his holiday,
and sometimes for a month at the beginning
of the year, when he travelled for orders.
At these times Mr. Telford rode into London
daily from Widmore, signed what letters and
26 PR.ETERITA.
bills needed signature, read the papers, and
rode home again ; any matters needing de-
liberation were referred to my father, or
awaited his return. All the family at Wid-
more would have been limitlessly kind to
my mother and me, if they had been permitted
any opportunity ; but my mother always felt,
in cultivated society, — and was too proud to
feel with patience, — the defects of her own
early education ; and therefore (which was
the true and fatal sign of such defect) never
familiarly visited any one whom she did not
feel to be, in some sort, her inferior.
Nevertheless, Mr. Telford had a singu-
larly important influence in my education.
By, I believe, his sisters' advice, he gave me,
as soon as it was published, the illustrated
edition of Rogers' Italy. This book was the
first means I had of looking carefully at
Turner's work : and I might, not without
some appearance of reason, attribute to the
gift the entire direction of my life's energies.
But it is the great error of thoughtless bio-
graphers to attribute to the accident which
introduces some new phase of character, all
the circumstances of character which gave
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 2 7
the accident importance. The essential point
to be noted, and accounted for, was that I
could understand Turner's work, when I saw
it ; — not by what chance, or in what year,
it was first seen. Poor Mr. Telford, never-
theless, was always held by papa and
mamma primarily responsible for my Turner
insanities.
29. In a more direct, though less intended
way, his help to me was important. For,
before my father thought it right to hire a
carriage for the above mentioned Midsummer
holiday, Mr. Telford always lent us his own
travelling chariot.
Now the old English chariot is the most
luxurious of travelling carriages, for two
persons, or even for two persons and so
much of third personage as I possessed at
three years old. The one in question was
hung high, so that we could see well over
stone dykes and average hedges out of it ;
such elevation being attained by the old-
fashioned folding steps, with a lovely padded
cushion fitting into the recess of the door,
— steps which it was one of my chief tra-
velling delights to see the hostlers fold up
2 8 PRiETERITA.
and down ; though my delight was painfully
alloyed by envious ambition to be allowed
to do it myself : — but I never was, — lest I
should pinch my fingers.
30. The 'dickey/ — (to think that I should
never till this moment have asked myself the
derivation of that word, and now be unable to
get at it !) — being, typically, that commanding
seat in her Majesty's mail, occupied by the
Guard ; and classical, even in modern litera-
ture, as the scene of Mr. Bob Sawyer's
arrangements with Sam, — was thrown* far
back in Mr. Telford's chariot, so as to give
perfectly comfortable room for the legs (if one
chose to travel outside on fine days), and to
afford beneath it spacious area to the boot, a
storehouse of rearward miscellaneous luggage.
Over which — with all the rest of forward and
superficial luggage — my nurse Anne presided,
both as guard and packer ; unrivalled, she, in
the flatness and precision of her in-laying of
dresses, as in turning of pancakes ; the fine
precision, observe, meaning also the easy wit
and invention of her art; for, no more in
packing a trunk than commanding a campaign,
is precision possible without foresight.
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 2Q
31. Among the people whom one must miss
out of one's life, dead, or worse than dead, by
the time one is past fifty, I can only say for
my own part, that the one I practically and
truly miss most next to father and mother,
(and putting losses of imaginary good out of
the question,) is this Anne, my father's nurse,
and mine. She was one of our ' many,' * (our
many being always but few,) and from her
girlhood to her old age, the entire ability of
her life was given to serving us. She had a
natural gift and speciality for doing disagree-
able things; above all, the service of a sick
room ; so that she was never quite in her
glory unless some of us were ill. She had
also some parallel speciality for saying dis-
agreeable things ; and might be relied upon to
give the extremely darkest view of any sub-
ject, before proceeding to ameliorative action
upon it. And she had a very creditable and
republican aversion to doing immediately, or
in set terms, as she was bid ; so that when
my mother and she got old together, and my
mother became very imperative and particular
about having her teacup set on one side of her
* Formerly ' Meinie,' 'attendant company.'
3<D PRiETERITA.
little round table, Anne would observantly
and punctiliously put it always on the other ;
which caused my mother to state to me, every
morning after breakfast, gravely, that if ever a
woman in this world was possessed by the
Devil, Anne was that woman. But in spite of
these momentary and petulant aspirations to
liberality and independence of character, poor
Anne remained very servile in soul all her
days; and was altogether occupied, from the
age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other
people's wills instead of her own, and seeking
other people's good instead of her own : nor
did I ever hear on any occasion of her doing
harm to a human being, except by saving two
hundred and some odd pounds for her rela-
tions ; in consequence of which some of them,
after her funeral, did not speak to the rest for
several months.
32. The dickey then aforesaid, being indis-
pensable for our guard Anne, was made wide
enough for two, that my father might go out-
side also when the scenery and day were fine.
The entire equipage was not a light one of its
kind ; but, the luggage being carefully limited,
went gaily behind good horses on the then
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 3 I
perfectly smooth mail roads; and posting, in
those days, being universal, so that at the
leading inns in every country town, the cry
" Horses out ! " down the yard, as one drove
up, was answered, often instantly, always
within five minutes, by the merry trot through
the archway of the booted and bright-jacketed
rider, with his caparisoned pair, — there was
no driver's seat in front : and the four large,
admirably fitting and sliding windows, admit-
ting no drop of rain when they were up, and
never sticking as they were let down, formed
one large moving oriel, out of which one saw
the country round, to the full half of the
horizon. My own prospect was more ex-
tended still, for my seat was the little box
containing my clothes, strongly made, with a
cushion on one end of it ; set upright in front
(and well forward), between my father and
mother. I was thus not the least in their
way, and my horizon of sight the widest pos-
sible. When no object of particular interest
presented itself, I trotted, keeping time with
the postboy on my trunk cushion for a saddle,
and whipped my father's legs for horses ; at
first theoretically only, with dexterous motion
32 PRiETERITA.
of wrist ; but ultimately in a quite practical
and efficient manner, my father having pre-
sented me with a silver-mounted postillion's
whip.
33. The Midsummer holiday, for better
enjoyment of which Mr. Telford provided
us with these luxuries, began usually on
the fifteenth of May, or thereabouts ; —
my father's birthday was the tenth ; on
that day I was always allowed to gather
the gooseberries for his first gooseberry pie
of the year, from the tree between the
buttresses on the north wall of the Heme
Hill garden ; so that we could not leave
before that festa. The holiday itself con-
sisted in a tour for orders through half
the English counties ; and a visit (if the
counties lay northward) to my aunt in
Scotland.
34. The mode of journeying was as fixed
as that of our home life. We went from
forty to fifty miles a day, starting always
early enough in the morning to arrive com-
fortably to four o'clock dinner. Generally,
therefore, getting off at six o'clock, a stage
or two were done before breakfast, with
<1
I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL. 33
the dew on the grass, and first scent from
the hawthorns; if in the course of the
midday drive there were any gentleman's
house to be seen, — or, better still, a lord's
— or, j best of all, a duke's, — my father
baited the horses, and took my mother
and me reverently through the state rooms;
always speaking a little under our breath
to the housekeeper, major domo, or other
authority in charge; and gleaning worship-
fully what fragmentary illustrations of the
history and domestic ways of the family
might fall from their lips.
35. In analyzing above, page 6, the effect
on my mind of all this, I have perhaps a
little antedated the supposed resultant im-
pression that it was probably happier to live
Sn a small house than a large one. But
assuredly, while I never to this day pass a
lattice-windowed cottage without wishing to
be its cottager, I never yet saw the castle
ivhich I envied to its lord ; and although
n the course of these many worshipful
pilgrimages I gathered curiously extensive
knowledge, both of art and natural scenery,
^fterwards infinitely useful, it is evident to
VOL. I,
\
34 PRJETERITA.
me in retrospect that my own character and
affections were little altered by them ; and
that the personal feeling and native instinct
of me had been fastened, irrevocably, long
before, to things modest, humble, and pure
in peace, under the low red roofs of Croydor
and by the cress-set rivulets in which tb
sand danced and minnows darted above tl
Springs of Wandel.
V
i
CHAPTER II.
HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS.
36. WHEN I was about four years old my
father found himself able to buy the lease of
a house on Heme Hill, a rustic eminence
four miles south of the ' Standard in Corn-
hill'; of which the leafy seclusion remains,
in all essential points of character, unchanged
to this day : certain Gothic splendours, lately
indulged in by our wealthier neighbours,
being the only serious innovations ; and
these are so graciously concealed by the fine
trees of their grounds, that the passing viator
remains unappalled by them ; and I can still
walk up and down the piece of road between
the Fox tavern and the Heme Hill station,
imagining myself four }^ears old.
37. Our house was the northernmost of
a group which stand accurately on the top
or dome of the hill, where the ground is
for a small space level, as the snows are, (I
35
36 PR^TERITA.
understand,) on the dome of Mont Blanc ; pre-
sently falling, however, in what may be, in
the London clay formation, considered a pre-
cipitous slope, to our valley of Chamouni (or
of Dulwich) on the east ; and with a softer
descent into Cold Harbour-lane* on the west :
on the south, no less beautifully declining to
the dale of the Effra, (doubtless shortened
from Effrena, signifying the 'Unbridled' river;
recently, I regret to say, bricked over for
the convenience of Mr. Biffin, chemist, and
others) ; while on the north, prolonged indeed
with slight depression some half mile or so,
and receiving, in the parish of Lambeth, the
chivalric title of ' Champion Hill,' it plunges
down at last to efface itself in the plains of
Peckham, and the rural barbarism of Goose
Green.
38. The group, of which our house was
the quarter, consisted of two precisely similar
partner-couples of houses, gardens and all
to match ; still the two highest blocks of
buildings seen from Norwood on the crest
* Said in the History of Croydon to be a name which
has long puzzled antiquaries, and nearly always found near
Roman military stations.
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 2)7
of the ridge ; so that the house itself, three-
storied, with garrets above, commanded, in
those comparatively smokeless days, a very
notable view from its garret windows, of the
Norwood hills on one side, and the winter
sunrise over them ; and of the valley of the
Thames on the other, with Windsor telescopi-
cally clear in the distance, and Harrow,
conspicuous always in fine weather to open
vision against the summer sunset. It had
front and back garden in sufficient proportion
to its size ; the front, richly set with old ever-
greens, and well-grown lilac and laburnum ;
the back, seventy yards long by twenty wide,
renowned over all the hill for its pears and
apples, which had been chosen with extreme
ire by our predecessor, (shame on me to
forget the name of a man to whom I owe so
much !) — and possessing also a strong old
mulberry tree, a tall white-heart cherry tree,
a black Kentish one, and an almost unbroken
hedge, all round, of alternate gooseberry and
currant bush ; decked, in due season, (for
the ground was wholly beneficent,) with
magical splendour of abundant fruit : fresh
green, soft amber, and rough-bristled crimson
t/
38 PRETERIT A.
bending the spinous branches ; clustered pearl
and pendant ruby joyfully discoverable under
the large leaves that looked like vine.
39. The differences of primal importance
which I observed between the nature of this
garden, and that of Eden, as I had imagined
it, were, that, in this one, all the fruit was
forbidden ; and there were no companionable
beasts : in other respects the little domain
answered every purpose of Paradise to me;
and the climate, in that cycle of our years,
allowed me to pass most of my life in it. My
mother never gave me more to learn than
she knew I could easily get learnt, if I set
myself honestly to work, by twelve o'clock.
She never allowed anything to disturb me
when my task was set; if it was not said
rightly by twelve o'clock, I was kept in till
I knew it, and in general, even when Latin
Grammar came to supplement the Psalms, I
was my own master for at least an hour
before half-past one dinner, and for the rest
of the afternoon.
40. My mother, herself finding her chief
personal pleasure in her flowers, was often
planting or pruning beside me, at least if I
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 39
chose to stay beside her. I never thought
of doing anything behind her back which I
would not have done before her face ; and
her presence was therefore no restraint to
me ; but, also, no particular pleasure, for,
from having always been left so much alone,
I had generally my own little affairs to see
after ; and, on the whole, by the time I was
seven years old, was already getting too in- /
dependent, mentally, even of my father and
mother; and, having nobody else to be de-
pendent upon, began to lead a very small,
perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-
Crusoe sort of life, in the central point which
it appeared to me, (as it must naturally appear
to geometrical animals,) that I occupied in the
universe.
41. This was partly the fault of my father's
modesty ; and partly of his pride. He had
so much more confidence in my mother's
judgment as to such matters than in his own, .
that he never ventured even to help, much less
to cross her, in the conduct of my education ;
on the other hand, in the fixed purpose of
making an ecclesiastical gentleman of me, with
the superfinest of manners, and access to the
V
40 PR^TERITA.
highest circles of fleshly and spiritual society,
the visits to Croydon, where I entirely loved
my aunt, and young baker-cousins, became
rarer and more rare : the society of our
neighbours on the hill could not be had
without breaking up our regular and sweetly
selfish manner of living ; and on the whole,
I had nothing animate to care for, in a childish
way, but myself, some nests of ants, which
the gardener would never leave undisturbed
for me, and a sociable bird or two ; though I
never had the sense or perseverance to make
one really tame. But that was partly because,
if ever I managed to bring one to be the least
trustful of me, the cats got it.
Under these circumstances, what powers
of imagination I possessed, either fastened
themselves on inanimate things — the sky, the
leaves, and pebbles, observable within the
walls of Eden, — or caught at any opportunity
of flight into regions of romance, compatible
with the objective realities of existence in
the nineteenth century, within a mile and a
quarter of Camberwell Green.
42. Herein my father, happily, though with
no definite intention other than of pleasing
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 4 I
me, when he found he could do so without
infringing any of my mother's rules, became
my guide. I was particularly fond of watch-
ing him shave; and was always allowed to
come into his room in the morning (under
the one in which I am now writing), to be
the motionless witness of that operation. Over
his dressing-table hung one of his own water-
colour drawings, made under the teaching of
the elder Nasmyth ; I believe, at the High
School of Edinburgh. It was done in the
early manner of tinting, which, just about
the time when my father was at the High
School, Dr. Munro was teaching Turner;
namely, in grey under-tints of Prussian blue
and British irk, washed with warm colour
afterwards on the lights. It represented
Conway Castle, with its Frith, and, in the
foreground, a cottage, a fisherman, and a boat
at the water's edge.*
43. When my father had finished shaving,
he always told me a story about this picture.
The custom began without any initial purpose
of his, in consequence of my troublesome
This drawing is still over the chimney-piece of my bed-
room at Brantwood.
42 PR^ETERITA.
curiosity whether the fisherman lived in the
cottage, and where he was going to in the
boat. It being settled, for peace' sake, that
he did live in the cottage, and was going in
the boat to fish near the castle, the plot of
the drama afterwards gradually thickened ;
and became, I believe, involved with that of
the tragedy of Douglas, and of the Castle
Spectre, in both of which pieces my father
had performed in private theatricals, before
my mother, and a select Edinburgh audience,
when he was a boy of sixteen, and she, at grave
twenty, a model housekeeper, and very scorn-
ful and religiously suspicious of theatricals.
But she was never weary of telling me, in
later years, how beautiful my father looked
in his Highland dress, with the high black
feathers.
44. In the afternoons, when my father re-
turned (always punctually) from his business,
he dined, at half- past four, in the front par-
lour, my mother sitting beside him to hear
the events of the day, and give counsel and
encouragement with respect to the same ; —
chiefly the last, for my father was apt to be
vexed if orders for sherry fell the least short
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 43
of their due standard, even for a day or two.
I was never present at this time, however,
and only avouch what I relate by hearsay
and probable conjecture ; for between four
and six it would have been a grave mis-
demeanour in me if I so much as approached
the parlour door. After that, in summer time,
we were all in the garden as long as the day
lasted ; tea under the white-heart cherry tree ;
or in winter and rough weather, at six o'clock
in the drawing-room, — I having my cup of
milk, and slice of bread-and-butter, in a little
recess, with a table in front of it, wholly
sacred to me ; and in which I remained in
the evenings as an Idol in a niche, while my
mother knitted, and my father read to her, —
and to me, so i«r as I chose to listen.
45. The series of the Waverley novels,
then drawing towards its close, was still the
chief source of delight in all households
caring for literature; and I can no more
recollect the time when I did not know
them than when I did not know the
Bible; but I have still a vivid remem-
brance of my father's intense expression
of sorrow mixed with scorn, as he threw
44 prjEterita.
down Count Robert of Paris, after reading
three or four pages ; and knew that the
life of Scott was ended : the scorn being a
very complex and bitter feeling in him, —
partly, indeed, of the book itself, but chiefly
of the wretches who were tormenting and
selling the wrecked intellect, and not a little,
deep down, of the subtle dishonesty which
had essentially caused the ruin. My father
never could forgive Scott his concealment of
the Ballantyne partnership.
46. Such being the salutary pleasures of
Heme Hill, I have next with deeper grati-
tude to chronicle what I owe to my mother
for the resolutely consistent lessons which
so exercised me in the Scriptures as to
make every word of them familiar to my ear
in habitual music, — yet in that familiarity
reverenced, as transcending all thought, and
ordaining all conduct.*
This she effected, not by her own sayings
or personal authority ; but simply by com-
pelling me to read the book thoroughly, for
myself. As soon as I was able to read with
* Compare the 52nd paragraph of chapter iii. of The Bible
of Amiens.
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 45
fluency, she began a course of Bible work
with me, which never ceased till I went to
Oxford. She read alternate verses with me,
watching, at first, every intonation of my
voice, and correcting the false ones, till she
made me understand the verse, if within my
reach, rightly, and energetically. It might
be beyond me altogether ; that she did not
care about ; but she made sure that as soon
as I got hold of it at all, I should get hold
of it by the right end.
In this way she began with the first verse
of Genesis, and went straight through, to
the last verse of the Apocalypse ; hard
names, numbers, Levitical law, and all; and
began again i. l Genesis the next day. If a
name was hard, the better the exercise in
pronunciation, — if a chapter was tiresome,
the better lesson in patience, — if loathsome,
the better lesson in faith that there was
some use in its being so outspoken. After
our chapters, (from two to three a day,
according to their length, the first thing
after breakfast, and no interruption from
servants allowed, — none from visitors, who
either joined in the reading or had to stay
46 PR^TERITA.
upstairs, — and none from any visitings or
excursions, except real travelling,) I had to
learn a few verses by heart, or repeat, to
make sure I had not lost, something of what
was already known ; and, with the chapters
thus gradually possessed from the first word
to the last, I had to learn the whole body of
the fine old Scottish paraphrases, which are
good, melodious, and forceful verse ; and
to which, together with the Bible itself,
I owe the first cultivation of my ear in
sound.
It is strange that of all the pieces of the
Bible which my mother thus taught me, that
which cost me most to learn, and which was,
to my child's mind, chiefly repulsive — the
119th Psalm — has now become of all the
most precious to me, in its overflowing and
glorious passion of love for the Law of God,
in opposition to the abuse of it by modern
preachers of what they imagine to be His
gospel.
47. But it is only by deliberate effort that
I recall the long morning hours of toil, as
regular as sunrise, — toil on both sides equal —
by which, year after year, my mother forced
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS 47
me to learn these paraphrases, and chapters,
(the eighth of 1st Kings being one — try it,
good reader, in a leisure hour !) allowing not
so much as a syllable to be missed or mis-
placed ; while every sentence was required
to be said over and over again till she was
satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect
a struggle between us of about three weeks,
concerning the accent of the 'of in the
lines
' Shall any following spring revive
The ashes of the urn ? ' —
I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and
partly in true instinct for rhythm, (being
wholly careless on the subject both of urns
and their conte. f s,) on reciting it with an
accented of. It was not, I say, till after three
weeks' labour, that my mother got the accent
lightened on the 'of and laid on the ashes,
to her mind. But had it taken three years
she would have done it, having once under-
taken to do it. And, assuredly, had she not
done it, — well, there's no knowing what would
have happened ; but I'm very thankful she
did.
48. I have just opened my oldest (in use)
48 PRETERIT A.
Bible, — a small, closely, and very neatly
printed volume it is, printed in Edinburgh by
Sir D. Hunter Blair and J. Bruce, Printers
to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, in
1 8 16. Yellow, now, with age, and flexible,
but not unclean, with much use, except that
the lower corners of the pages at 8th of 1st
Kings, and 32nd Deuteronomy, are worn
somewhat thin and dark, the learning of
these two chapters having cost me much
pains. My mother's list of the chapters with
which, thus learned, she established my soul
in life,* has just fallen out of it. I will take
what indulgence the incurious reader can
give me, for printing the list thus acci-
dentally occurrent : —
Exodus, chapters 15th and 20th.
2 Samuel ,, 1st, from 17th verse
to the end.
1 Kings „ 8th.
* This expression in Fors has naturally been supposed by
some readers to mean that my mother at this time made m|
vitally and evangelically religious. The fact was far other-
wise. I meant only that she gave me secure ground for all.
future life, practical or spiritual. See the paragraph next
following.
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS 49
Psalms
chapters
23rd, 32nd, 90th, 9ISt,
103rd, 112th, 119th,
139th.
Proverbs
>>
2nd, 3rd, 8th, 1 2th.
Isaiah
M
58th.
Matthew
t>
5th, 6th, 7th.
Acts
f>
26th.
1 Corinthians
>>
13th, 15th.
James
)t
4th.
Revelation
)>
5th, 6th.
And truly, though I have picked up the
elements of a little further knowledge — in
mathematics, meteorology, and the like, in
after life, — and owe not a little to the teaching
of many people, this maternal installation of
my mind in that property of chapters, I
count very confidently the most precious,
and, on the whole, the one essential part of
all my education.
And it is perhaps already time to mark
what advantage and mischief, by the chances
of life up to seven years old, had been irre-
vocably determined for me.
I will first count my blessings (as a not
unwise friend once recommended me to do,
VOL. I. D
5o
PR^TERITA.
continually; whereas I have a bad trick of
always numbering the thorns in my fingers
and not the bones in them).
And for best and truest beginning all
blessings, I had been taught the perfect
meaning of Peace, in thought, act, and
word.
I never had heard my father's or mother's
voice once raised in any question with each
other; nor seen an angry, or even slightly
hurt or offended, glance in the eyes of either.
I had never heard a servant scolded ; nor
even suddenly, passionately, or in any severe
manner, blamed. I had never seen a moment's
trouble or disorder in any household matter ;
nor anything whatever either done in a hurry,
or undone in due time. I had no conception
of such a feeling as anxiety ; my father's
occasional vexation in the afternoons, when
he had only got an order for twelve butts
after expecting one for fifteen, as I have just
stated, was never manifested to me ; and
itself related only to the question whether
his name would be a step higher or lower in
the year's list of sherry exporters ; for he
never spent more than half his income, and
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 5 I
therefore found himself little incommoded by
occasional variations in the total of it. I
had never done any wrong that I knew of —
beyond occasionally delaying the commitment
to heart of some improving sentence, that I
might watch a wasp on the window pane, or
a bird in the cherry tree ; and I had never
seen any grief.
49. Next to this quite priceless gift of
Peace, I had received the perfect understand-
ing of the natures of Obedience and Faith.
I obeyed word, or lifted finger, of father or
mother, simply as a ship her helm ; not only
without idea of resistance, but receiving the
direction as a part of my own life and force,
a helpful law, as necessary to me in every
moral action as the law of gravity in leaping.
And my practice in Faith was soon complete :
nothing was ever promised me that was not
given ; nothing ever threatened me that was
not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that
was not true.
Peace, obedience, faith ; these three for
chief good ; next to these, the habit of fixed
attention with both eyes and mind — on which
I will not further enlarge at this moment,
5 2 PRjETERITA.
this being the main practical faculty of my
life, causing Mazzini to say of me, in con-
versation authentically reported, a year or
two before his death, that I had 'the most
analytic mind in Europe.' An opinion in
which, so far as I am acquainted with Europe,
I am myself entirely disposed to concur.
Lastly, an extreme perfection in palate and
all other bodily senses, given by the utter
prohibition of cake, wine, comfits, or, except
in carefullest restriction, fruit ; and by fine
preparation of what food was given me. Such
I esteem the main blessings of my child-
hood; — next, let me count the equally dominant
calamities.
50. First, that I had nothing to love.
My parents were — in a sort — visible powers
of nature to me, no more loved than the sun
and the moon : only I should have been
annoyed and puzzled if either of them had
gone out ; /(how much, now, when both are
darkened !) — still less did I love God ; not
that I had any quarrel with Him, or fear
of Him ; but simply found what people
told me was His service, disagreeable ; and
what people told me was His book, not
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 53
entertaining. I had no companions to quarrel
with, neither; nobody to assist, and nobody
to thank. Not a servant was ever allowed to
do anything for me, but what it was their
duty to do ; and why should I have been
grateful to the cook for cooking, or the
gardener for gardening, — when the one dared
not give me a baked potato without asking
leave, and the other would not let my ants'
nests alone, because they made the walks
untidy ? The evil consequence of all this
was not, however, what might perhaps have
been expected, that I grew up selfish or un-
affectionate ; but that, when affection did
come, it came with violence utterly rampant
and unmanageable, at least by me, who never
before had anything to manage.
51. For (second of chief calamities) I had *
nothing to endure. Danger or pain of any >
kind I knew not : my strength was never
exercised, my patience never tried, and my
courage never fortified. Not that I was ever
afraid of anything, — either ghosts, thunder, or
beasts ; an^ one of the nearest approaches to
insubordination which I was ever tempted
into as a child, was in passionate effort to
5 4 pr^eterita.
get leave to play with the lion's cubs in
Wombwell's menagerie.
J 52. Thirdly. I was taught no precision nor
etiquette of manners ; it was enough if, in the
little society we saw, I remained unobtrusive,
and replied to a question without shyness:
but the shyness came later, and increased as I
grew conscious of the rudeness arising from
the want of social discipline, and found it
impossible to acquire, in advanced life, dex-
terity in any bodily exercise, skill in any
pleasing accomplishment, or ease and tact in
ordinary behaviour.
J 53. Lastly, and chief of evils. My judg-
ment of right and wrong, and powers of
independent action,* were left entirely un-
developed ; because the bridle and blinkers
were never taken off me. Children should
have their times of being off duty, like
soldiers ; and when once the obedience, if
required, is certain, the little creature should
be very early put for periods of practice in
complete command of itself; set on the bare-
backed horse of its own will, and left to break
* Action, observe, I say here : in thought I was too in-
dependent, as I said above.
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 5 5
it by its own strength. But the ceaseless
authority exercised over my youth left me,
when cast out at last into the world, unable
for some time to do more than drift with its
vortices.
54. My present verdict, therefore, on the
general tenor of my education at that time,
must be, that it was at once too formal and
too luxurious ; leaving my character, at the
most important moment for its construction,
cramped indeed, but not disciplined ; and only
by protection innocent, instead of by practice
virtuous. My mother saw this herself, and
but too clearly, in later years ; and whenever
I did anything wrong, stupid, or hard-hearted,
— (and I have done many things that were all
three,) — always said, ' It is because you were
too much indulged.'
55. Thus far, with some omissions, I have
merely reprinted the account of these times
given in Fors : and I fear the sequel may be
more trivial, because much is concentrated in
the foregoing broad statement, which I have
now to continue by slower steps ; — and yet
less amusing, because I tried always in Fors
to say things, if I could, a little piquantly ;
56 PR^TERITA.
and the rest of the things related in this book
will be told as plainly as I can. But whether
I succeeded in writing piquantly in Fors or
not, I certainly wrote often obscurely; and
the description above given of Heme Hill
seems to me to need at once some reduction
to plainer terms.
56. The actual height of the long ridge
of Heme Hill, above Thames, — at least
above the nearly Thames-level of its base at
Camberwell Green, is, I conceive, not more
than one hundred and fifty feet : but it gives
the whole of this fall on both sides of it in
about a quarter of a mile ; forming, east and
west, a succession of quite beautiful pleasure-
ground and gardens, instantly dry after rain,
and in which, for children, running down is
pleasant play, and rolling a roller up, vigorous
work. The view from the ridge on both sides
was, before railroads came, entirely lovely :
westward at evening, almost sublime, over
softly wreathing distances of domestic wood ;
— Thames herself not visible, nor any fields
except immediately beneath; but the tops of
twenty square miles of politely inhabited
groves. On the other side, east and south,
II. HERNE-HILI. ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 57
the Norwood hills, partly rough with furze,
partly wooded with birch and oak, partly in
pure green bramble copse, and rather steep
pasture, rose with the promise of all the rustic
loveliness of Surrey and Kent in them, and
with so much of space and height in their
sweep, as gave them some fellowship with
hills of true hill-districts. Fellowship now
inconceivable, for the Crystal Palace, without
ever itself attaining any true aspect of size,
and possessing no more sublimity than a
cucumber frame between two chimneys, yet
by its stupidity of hollow bulk, dwarfs the
hills at once ; so that now one thinks of them
no more but as three long lumps of clay, on
lease for building. But then, the Nor-wood,
or North wood, so called as it was seen from
Croydon, in opposition to the South wood of
the Surrey downs, drew itself in sweeping
crescent good five miles round Dulwich to the
south, broken by lanes of ascent, Gipsy Hill,
and others ; and, from the top, commanding
views towards Dartford, and over the plain of
Croydon, — in contemplation of which I one
day frightened my mother out of her wits by
saying ' the eyes were coming out of my
5 8
PRiETERlTA.
head ! ' She thought it was an attack of
coup-de-soleil.
57. Central in such amphitheatre, the
crowning glory of Heme Hill was accordingly,
that, after walking along its ridge southward
from London through a mile of chestnut, lilac,
and apple trees, hanging over the wooden
palings on each side — suddenly the trees
stopped on the left, and out one came on the
top of a field sloping down to the south into
Dulwich valley — open field animate with cow
and buttercup, and below, the beautiful
meadows and high avenues of Dulwich ; and
beyond, all that crescent of the Norwood
hills ; a footpath, entered by a turnstile, going
down to the left, always so warm that invalids
could be sheltered there in March, when to
walk elsewhere would have been death to
them ; and so quiet, that whenever I had any-
thing difficult to compose or think of, I used
to do it rather there than in our own garden.
The great field was separated from the path
and road only by light wooden open palings,
four feet high, needful to keep the cows in.
Since I last composed, or meditated there,
various improvements have taken place ; first
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 59
the neighbourhood wanted a new church, and
built a meagre Gothic one with a useless spire,
for the fashion of the thing, at the side of the
field ; then they built a parsonage behind it,
the two stopping out half the view in that
direction. Then the Crystal Palace came, for
ever spoiling the view through all its compass,
and bringing every show-day, from London, a
flood of pedestrians down the footpath, who
left it filthy with cigar ashes for the rest of
the week : then the railroads came, and expa-
tiating roughs by every excursion train, who
knocked the palings about, roared at the cows,
and tore down what branches of blossom they
could reach over the palings on the enclosed
side. Then the residents on the enclosed
side built a brick wall to defend themselves.
Then the path got to be insufferably hot
as well as dirty, and was gradually aban-
doned to the roughs, with a policeman on
watch at the bottom. Finally, this year, a
six foot high close paling has been put
down the other side of it, and the processional
excursionist has the liberty of obtaining what
notion of the country air and prospect he
may, between the wall and that, with one bad
60 pr^eterita.
cigar before him, another behind him, and
another in his mouth.
58. I do not mean this book to be in any
avoidable way disagreeable or querulous ; but
expressive generally of my native disposition
— which, though I say it, is extremely amiable,
when I'm not bothered : I will grumble else-
where when I must, and only notice this
injury alike to the resident and excursionist
at Heme Hill, because questions of right-of-
way are now of constant occurrence ; and
in most cases, the mere path is the smallest
part of the old Right, truly understood The
Right is of the cheerful view and sweet air
which the path commanded.
Also, I may note in passing, that for all
their talk about Magna Charta, very few
Englishmen are aware that one of the main
provisions of it is that Law should not
be sold ; * and it seems to me that the
law of England might preserve Banstead
and other downs free to the poor of Eng-
land, without charging me, as it has just
done, a hundred pounds for its temporary
* "To no one will We sell, to no one will We deny or
defer, Right, or Justice."
II. HERNE-HILL ALMOND BLOSSOMS. 6 1
performance of that otherwise unremunera-
tive duty.
59. I shall have to return over the ground
of these early years, to fill gaps, after getting
on a little first ; but will yet venture here the
tediousness of explaining that my saying " in
Heme Hill garden all fruit was forbidden,"
only meant, of course, forbidden unless under
defined restriction ; which made the various
gatherings of each kind in its season a sort
of harvest festival ; and which had this further
good in its apparent severity, that, although
in the at last indulgent areas, the peach which
my mother gathered for me when she was
sure it was ripe, and the cherry pie for which
I had chosen the cherries red all round, were,
I suppose, of more ethereal flavour to me than
they could have been to children allowed to
pluck and eat at their will ; still the unalloyed
and long continuing pleasure given me by our
fruit-tree avenue was in its blossom, not in
its bearing. For the general epicurean enjoy-
ment of existence, potatoes well browned,
green pease well boiled, — broad beans of the
true bitter, — and the pots of damson and
currant for whose annual filling we were
62
PR^ETERITA.
dependent more on the greengrocer than the
garden, were a hundredfold more important
to me than the dozen or two of nectarines of
which perhaps I might get the halves of three,
— (the other sides mouldy) — or the bushel or
two of pears which went directly to the store-
shelf. So that, very early indeed in my
thoughts of trees, I had got at the principle
given fifty years afterwards in " Proserpina,"
that the seeds and fruits of them were for the
sake of the flowers, not the flowers for the
fruit. The first joy of the year being in its
snowdrops, the second, and cardinal one, was
in the almond blossom, — every other garden
and woodland gladness following from that
in an unbroken order of kindling flower and
shadowy leaf; and for many and many a year
to come, — until indeed, the whole of life be-
came autumn to me, — my chief prayer for the
kindness of heaven, in its flowerful seasons,
was that the frost might not touch the almond
blossom.
CHAPTER III.
THE BANKS OF TAY.
60. THE reader has, I hope, observed that in
all I have hitherto said, emphasis has been
laid only on the favourable conditions which
surrounded the child whose history I am
writingjjand on the docile and impressionable
quietness of its temper^
No claim has been made for it to any
special power or capacity ; for, indeed, none
such existed, except that patience in looking,
and precision in feeling, which afterwards,
with due industry, formed my analytic power, j
In all essential qualities of genius, except
these, I was deficient ; my memory only of
average power. I have literally never known
a child so incapable of acting a part, or telling
a tale. On the other hand, I have never
known one whose thirst for visible fact was
at once so eager and so methodic.
61. I find also that in the foregoing accounts,
63
64 PRiETERITA.
modest as I meant them to be, higher literature
is too boastfully spoken of as my first and
exclusive study. My little Pope's Iliad, and,
in any understanding of them, my Genesis
and Exodus, were certainly of little account
with me till after I was ten. My calf milk of
books was, on the lighter side, composed of
Dame Wiggins of Lee, the Peacock at Home,
and the like nursery rhymes ; and on the
graver side, of Miss Edgeworth's Frank, and
Harry and Lucy, combined with Joyce's Scien-
tific Dialogues. The earliest dated efforts I
can find, indicating incipient motion of brain-
molecules, are six ' poems ' on subjects selected
from those works; between the fourth and
fifth of which my mother has written : "Janu-
ary, 1826. This book begun about September
or October, 1826, finished about January,
1827." The whole of it, therefore, was written
and printed in imitation of book-print, in my
seventh year. The book is a little red one,
ruled with blue, six inches high by four wide,
containing forty-five leaves pencilled in imita-
tion of print on both sides, — the title-page,
written in the form here approximately imitated,
on the inside of the cover.
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 65
HARRY AND LUCY
CONCLUDED
BEING THE LAST
PART OF
EARLY LESSONS
in four volumes
vol I
with copper
plates
PRINTED and composed by a little boy
and also drawn
vol. 1. e
66 PR.ETERITA.
62. Of the promised four volumes, it appears
that (according to my practice to this day) I
accomplished but one and a quarter, the first
volume consisting only of forty leaves, the
rest of the book being occupied by the afore-
said six 'poems,' and the forty leaves losing
ten of their pages in the 'copper plates,'
of which the one, purporting to represent
' Harry's new road,' is, I believe, my first
effort at mountain drawing. The passage
closing the first volume of this work is,
I think, for several reasons, worth preser-
vation. I print it, therefore, with its own
divisions of line, and three variations of
size in imitated type. Punctuation must be
left to the reader's kind conjecture. The
hyphens, it is to be noticed, were put long
or short, to make the print even, not that
it ever succeeds in being so, but the vari-
ously spaced lines here imitate it pretty
well.
Harry knew very well-
what it was and went
on with his drawing but
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 6?
Lucy soon called him aw-
ay and bid him observe
a great black cloud from-
the north which seemed ra
ther electrical. Harry ran
for an electrical apparatus which
his father had given him and the-
cloud electrified his apparatus positively
after that another cloud came which
electrified his apparatus negatively
68 PR-iETERITA.
and then a long train of smaller
ones but before this cloud came
a great cloud of dust rose from
the ground and followed the pos
itive cloud and at length seemed
to come in contact with it and
when the other cloud came
a flash of lightning was seen
to dart through the cloud of
dust upon which the negative
cloud spread very much and
dissolved in rain which pres
ently cleared the sky
After this phenomenon was over
and also the surprise Harry began
to wonder how electricity
could get where there was
so much water but he soon-
observed a rainbow and a-
rising mist under it which
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 69
his fancy soon transform
ed into a female form. He
then remembered the witch of
the waters at the Alps who
was raised from them by-
takeing some water in the-
hand and throwing it into
the air pronouncing some
unintelligable words. And
though it was a tale it-
affected Harry now when
he saw in the clouds some-
end of Harry thing
and Lucy like it.
63. The several reasons aforesaid, which in-
duce me to reprint this piece of, too literally,
1 composition,' are — the first, that it is a toler-
able specimen of my seven years old spelling ;
— tolerable only, not fair, since it was ex-
tremely unusual with me to make a mistake
at all, whereas here there are two (taking
70 PR.ETERITA.
and unintelligible), which I can only account
for by supposing I was in too great a hurry
to finish my volume ; — the second, that the
adaptation of materials for my story out of
Joyce's Scientific Dialogues * and Manfred, is
an extremely perfect type of the interwoven
temper of my mind, at the beginning of days
just as much as at their end — which has
always made foolish scientific readers doubt
my books because there was love of beauty
in them, and foolish aesthetic readers doubt
* The original passage is as follows, vol. vi., edition of
1S21, p. 138 : —
"Dr. Franklin mentions a remarkable appearance which
occurred to Mr. Wilke, a considerable electrician. On the
20th of July, 1758, at three o'clock in the afternoon, he
observed a great quantity of dust rising from the ground,
and covering a field, and part of the town in which he then
was. There was no wind, and the dust moved gently
towards the east, where there appeared a great black cloud,
which electrified his apparatus positively to a very high
degree. This cloud went towards the west, the dust
followed it, and continued to rise higher and higher, till it
composed a thick pillar, in the form of a sugar-loaf, and at
length it seemed to be in contact with the cloud. At some
distance from this, there came another great cloud, with a
long stream of smaller ones, which electrified his apparatus
negatively ; and when they came near the positive cloud, a
flash of lightning was seen to dart through the cloud of
dust, upon which the negative clouds spread very much,
and dissolved in rain, which presently cleared the atmos-
phere."
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. J I
my books because there was love of science
in them ; — the third, that the extremely reason-
able method of final judgment, upon which I
found my claim to the sensible reader's respect
for these dipartite writings, cannot be better
illustrated than by this proof, that, even at
seven years old, no tale, however seductive,
could "affect" Harry, until he had seen — in
the clouds, or elsewhere — " something like it."
Of the six poems which follow, the first is
on the Steam-engine, beginning,
" When furious up from mines the water pours,
And clears from rusty moisture all the ores ;"
and the last on the Rainbow, " in blank verse,"
as being of a didactic character, with observa-
tions on the ignorant and unreflective disposi-
tions of certain people.
" But those that do not know about that light,
Reflect not on it ; and in all that light,
Not one of all the colours do they know."
64. It was only, I think, after my seventh
year had been fulfilled in these meditations,
that my mother added the Latin lesson to the
Bible-reading, and accurately established the
daily routine which was sketched in the
7 2 PR^TERITA.
foregoing chapter. But it extremely surprises
me, in trying, at least for my own amusement,
if not the reader's, to finish the sketch into its
corners, that I can't recollect now what used
to happen first in the morning, except break-
fasting in the nursery, and if my Croydon
cousin Bridget happened to be staying with
us, quarrelling with her which should have
the brownest bits of toast. That must have
been later on, though, for I could not have
been promoted to toast at the time I am think-
ing of. Nothing is well clear to me of the
day's course, till, after my father had gone to
the City by the coach, and my mother's house-
hold orders been quickly given, lessons began
at half-past nine, with the Bible readings
above described, and the two or three verses
to be learned by heart, with a verse of para-
phrase ; — then a Latin declension or a bit of
verb, and eight words of vocabulary from
Adam's Latin Grammar, (the best that ever
was,) and the rest of the day was my own.
Arithmetic was wholesomely remitted till much
later; geography I taught myself fast enough
in my own way; history was never thought
of, beyond what I chose to read of Scott's
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 73
Tales of a Grandfather. Thus, as aforesaid,
by noon I was in the garden on fine days, or
left to my own amusements on wet ones ; of
which I have farther at once to note that
nearly as soon as I could crawl, my toy-bricks
of lignum vitac had been constant companions :
and I am graceless in forgetting by what ex-
travagant friend, (I greatly suspect my Croydon
aunt,) I was afterwards gifted with a two-
arched bridge, admirable in fittings of voussoir
and keystone, and adjustment of the level
courses of masonry with bevelled edges, into
which they dovetailed, in the style of Waterloo
Bridge. Well-made centreings, and a course
of inlaid steps down to the water, made this
model largely, as accurately, instructive : and
I was never weary of building, wwbuilding, —
(it was too strong to be thrown down, but
had always to be taken down,) — and rebuilding
it. This inconceivable passive — or rather im-
passive — contentment in doing, or reading, the
same thing over and over again, I perceive to
have been a great condition in my future power
of getting thoroughly to the bottom of matters.
65. Some people would say that in getting
these toys lay the chance that guided me to
74 PRJETERITA.
an early love of architecture ; but I never
saw or heard of another child so fond of its
toy bricks, except Miss Edgeworth's Frank.
To be sure, in this present age, — age of
universal brickfield though it be, — people
don't give their children toy bricks, but toy
puff-puffs ; and the little things are always
taking tickets and arriving at stations, without
ever fathoming — none of them will take pains
enough to do t/iat, — the principle of a puff-
puff! And what good could they get of it if
they did, — unless they could learn also, that
no principle of Puff-puff would ever supersede
the principle of Breath ?
But I not only mastered, with Harry and
Lucy, the entire motive principle of puff-puff;
but also, by help of my well-cut bricks, very
utterly the laws of practical stability in towers
and arches, by the time I was seven or eight
years old : and these studies of structure were
farther animated by my invariable habit of
watching, with the closest attention, the pro-
ceedings of any bricklayers, stone-sawyers, or
paviours, — whose work my nurse would allow
me to stop to contemplate in our walks; or,
delight of delights, might be seen at ease
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 7 5
from some fortunate window of inn or lodging
on our journeys. In those cases the day was
not long enough for my rapturous and riveted
observation.
66. Constantly, as aforesaid, in the garden
when the weather was fine, my time there
was passed chiefly in the same kind of close
watching of the ways of plants. I had not
the smallest taste for growing them, or taking
care of them, any more than for taking care of
the birds, or the trees, or the sky, or the sea.
My whole time passed in staring at them, or
into them. In no morbid curiosity, but in
admiring wonder, I pulled every flower to
pieces till I knew all that could be seen of
it with a child's eyes ; and used to lay up
little treasures of seeds, by way of pearls and
beads, — never with any thought of sowing
them. The old gardener only came once a
week, for what sweeping and weeding needed
doing ; I was fain to learn to sweep the walks
with him, but was discouraged and shamed by
his always doing the bits I had done over
again. I was extremely fond of digging holes,
but that form of gardening was not allowed.
Necessarily, I fell always back into my merely
J 6 PRJETERITA.
contemplative mind, and at nine years old
began a poem, called Eudosia, — I forget
wholly where I got hold of this name, or
what I understood by it, — ' On the Universe,'
though I could understand not a little by it,
now. A couplet or two, as the real beginning
at once of Deucalion and Proserpina, may be
perhaps allowed, together with the preceding,
a place in this grave memoir ; the rather that
I am again enabled to give accurate date —
September 28th, 1828 — for the beginning of
its ' First book,' as follows : —
' When first the wrath of heaven o'erwhelmed the world,
And o'er the rocks, and hills, and mountains, hurl'd
The waters' gathering mass ; and sea o'er shore, —
Then mountains fell, and vales, unknown before,
Lay where they were. Far different was the Earth
When first the flood came down, than at its second birth.
Now for its produce ! — Queen of flowers, O rose,
From whose fair coloured leaves such odour flows,
Thou must now be before thy subjects named,
Both for thy beauty and thy sweetness famed.
Thou art the flower of England, and the flow'r
Of Beauty too — of Venus' odrous bower.
And thou wilt often shed sweet odours round,
And often stooping, hide thy head on ground.*
* An awkward way — chiefly for the rhyme's sake — of
saying that roses are often too heavy for their stalks.
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 77
And then the lily, towering up so proud,
And raising its gay head among the various crowd,
There the black spots upon a scarlet ground,
And there the taper-pointed leaves are found.'
67. In 220 lines, of such quality, the first
book ascends from the rose to the oak. The
second begins — to my surprise, and in ex-
tremely exceptional violation of my above-
boasted custom — with an ecstatic apostrophe to
what I had never seen !
' I sing the Pine, which clothes high Switzer's * head.
And high enthroned, grows on a rocky bed,
On gulphs so deep, on cliffs that are so high,
He that would dare to climb them dares to die.'
This enthusiasm, however, only lasts —
mostly exhausting itself in a description,
verified out of Harry and Lucy, of the slide
of Alpnach, — through j6 lines, when the
verses cease, and the book being turned up-
side down, begins at the other end with the
information that ' Rock-crystal is accompanied
by Actynolite, Axinite, and Epidote, at Bourg
d'Oisans in Dauphiny.' But the garden-
meditations never ceased, and it is impossible
to say how much strength was gained, or how
* Switzer, clearly short for Switzerland.
7 8 PRiETERITA.
much time uselessly given, except in pleasure,
to these quiet hours and foolish rhymes.
Their happiness made all the duties of outer
life irksome, and their unprogressive reveries
might, the reader may think, if my mother had
wished, have been changed into a beginning
of sound botanical knowledge. But, while
there were books on geology and mineralogy
which I could understand, all on botany were
then, — and they are little mended now, —
harder than the Latin grammar. The minera-
logy was enough for me seriously to work at,
and I am inclined finally to aver that the
garden-time could not have been more rightly
passed, unless in weeding.
68. At six punctually I joined my father
and mother at tea, being, in the drawing-
room, restricted to the inhabitation of the
sacred niche above referred to, a recess beside
the fireplace, well lighted from the lateral
window in the summer evenings, and by the
chimney-piece lamp in winter, and out of all
inconvenient heat, or hurtful draught. A
good writing-table before it shut me well in,
and carried my plate and cup, or books in
service. After tea, my father read to my
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 79
mother what pleased themselves, I picking up
what I could, or reading what I liked better
instead. Thus I heard all the Shakespeare
comedies and historical plays again and again,
— all Scott, and all Don Quixote, a favourite
book of my father's, and at which I could
then laugh to ecstasy; now, it is one of the
saddest, and, in some things, the most offen-
sive of books to me.
My father was an absolutely beautiful reader
of the best poetry and prose ; — of Shakespeare,
Pope, Spenser, Byron, and Scott ; as of Gold-
smith, Addison, and Johnson. Lighter ballad
poetry he had not fineness of ear to do justice
to : his sense of the strength and wisdom of
true meaning, and of the force of rightly
ordered syllables, made his delivery of Hamlet,
Lear, Caesar, or Marmion, melodiously grand
and just; but he had no idea of modulating
the refrain of a ballad, and had little patience
with the tenor of its sentiment. He looked
always, in the matter of what he read, for
heroic will and consummate reason ; never
tolerated the morbid love of misery for its own
sake, and never read, either for his own
pleasure or my instruction, such ballads as
80 PR^TERITA.
Burd Helen, the Twa Corbies, or any other
rhyme or story which sought its interest in
vain love or fruitless death.
But true, pure, and ennobling sadness began
very early to mingle its undertone with the
constant happiness of those days; — a ballad
music, beautiful in sincerity, and hallowing
them like cathedral chant. Concerning which,
— I must go back now to the days I have
only heard of with the hearing of the ear,
and yet of which some are to me as if mine
eyes had seen them.
69. It must have been a little after 1780
that my paternal grandmother, Catherine
Tweeddale, ran away with my paternal grand-
father when she was not quite sixteen ; and
my aunt Jessie, my father's only sister, was
born a year, afterwards ; a few weeks after
which event, my grandmother, not yet seven-
teen, was surprised, by a friend who came into
her room unannounced, dancing a threesome
reel, with two chairs for her partners; she
having found at the moment no other way of
adequately expressing the pleasure she took in
this mortal life, and its gifts and promises.
The latter failed somewhat afterwards ; and
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 8 I
my aunt Jessie, a very precious and perfect
creature, beautiful in her dark-eyed, Highland
way, — utterly religious, in her quiet Puritan
way, — and very submissive to Fates mostly
unkind, was married to a somewhat rough
tanner, with a fairly good business in the
good town of Perth : and, when I was old
enough to be taken first to visit them, my
aunt and my uncle the tanner lived in a
square-built grey stone house in the suburb
of Perth known as 'Bridge-End,' the house
some fifty yards north of the bridge ; its
garden sloping steeply to the Tay, which
eddied, three or four feet deep of sombre
crystal, round the steps where the servants
dipped their pails.
70. A mistaken correspondent in Fors once
complained of my coarse habit of sneering at
people of no ancestry. I have no such habit ;
though not always entirely at ease in writing
of my uncles the baker and the tanner. And
my readers may trust me when I tell them
that, in now remembering my dreams in the
house of the entirely honest chief baker of
Market Street, Croydon, and of Peter — not
Simon — the tanner, whose house was by the
vol. 1. F
8 2 PRJETERITA.
riverside of Perth, I would not change the
dreams, far less the tender realities, of those
early days, for anything I hear now remem-
bered by lords or dames, of their days of
childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns
and lakes in park-walled forest.
Lawn and lake enough indeed I had, in the
North Inch of Perth, and pools of pausing
Tay, before Rose Terrace, (where I used to
live after my uncle died, briefly apoplectic, at
Bridge-End,) in the peace of the fair Scotch
summer days, with my widowed aunt, and my
little cousin Jessie, then traversing a bright
space between her sixth and ninth year ; dark-
eyed deeply,* like her mother, and similarly
pious ; so that she and I used to compete in
the Sunday evening Scriptural examinations ;
and be as proud as two little peacocks because
Jessie's elder brothers, and sister Mary, used
to get ' put down,' and either Jessie or I was
always ' Dux.' We agreed upon this that we
would be married when we were a little older ;
not considering it to be preparatorily necessary
to be in any degree wiser.
* As opposed to the darkness of mere iris, making the
eyes like black cherries.
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 83
71. Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-
work in the house at Rose Terrace was a
very old " Mause," — before, my grandfather's
servant in Edinburgh, — who might well have
been the prototype of the Mause of ' Old
Mortality,' * but had even a more solemn,
fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by
extreme suffering; for she had been nearly
starved to death when she was a girl, and had
literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-
heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see
the waste of an atom of food was as shocking
to her as blasphemy. " Oh, Miss Margaret ! "
she said once to my mother, who had shaken
* Vulgar modern Puritanism has shown its degeneracy
in nothing more than in its incapability of understanding
Scott's exquisitely finished portraits of the Covenanter. In
' Old Mortality ' alone, there are four which cannot be
surpassed ; the typical one, Elspeth, faultlessly sublime and
pure ; the second, Ephraim Macbriar, giving the too common
phase of the character, which is touched with ascetic insanity ;
the third, Mause, coloured and made sometimes ludicrous
by Scottish conceit, but utterly strong and pure at heart ;
the last, Balfour, a study of supreme interest, showing the
effect of the Puritan faith, sincerely held, on a naturally and
incurably cruel and base spirit. Add to these four studies,
from this single novel, those in the ' Heart of Midlothian,'
and Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice from ' Rob Roy,'
and you have a series of theological analyses far beyond those
of any other philosophical work that I know, of any period.
84 PR^TERITA.
some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the
window, " I had rather you had knocked me
down." She would make her dinner upon
anything in the house that the other servants
wouldn't eat ; — often upon potato skins, giving
her own dinner away to any poor person she
saw; and would always stand during the
whole church service, (though at least seventy
years old when I knew her, and very feeble,)
if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of
the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled
and worn face, moveless in resolution and
patience, incapable of smile, and knit some-
times perhaps too severely against Jessie and
me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our
porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on
Sunday, — (' Never mind, John,' said Jessie to
me, once seeing me in an unchristian state
of provocation on this subject, ' when we're
married, we'll jump off boxes all day long, if
we like ! ') — may have been partly instru-
mental in giving me that slight bias against
Evangelical religion, which I confess to be
sometimes traceable in my later works ; but I
never can be thankful enough for having
seen, in our own " Old Mause," the Scottish
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 85
Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force;
and been enabled therefore afterwards to
trace its agency in the reforming policy of
Scotland, with the reverence and honour it
deserves.
72. My aunt, a pure dove-priestess, if ever
there was one, of Highland Dodona, was of a
far gentler temper; but still, to me, remained
at a wistful distance. She had been much
saddened by the loss of three of her children
before her husband's death. Little Peter,
especially, had been the corner-stone of her
love's building; and it was thrown down
swiftly : — white swelling came in the knee ; he
suffered much, and grew weaker gradually,
dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient.
She wanted him one day to take half a glass
of port wine, and took him on her knee, and
put it to his lips. ' Not now, mamma ; in a
minute,' said he; and put his head on her
shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and
died. Then there was Catherine; and — I
forget the other little daughter's name, I did
not see them ; my mother told me of them ;
— eagerly always about Catherine, who had
been her own favourite. My aunt had been
86 PRJETERITA.
talking earnestly one day with her husband
about these two children ; planning this
and that for their schooling and what
not : at night, for a little while she could
not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she
saw the door of the room open, and two
spades come into it, and stand at the foot
of her bed. Both the children were dead
within brief time afterwards. I was about
to write ' within a fortnight ' — but I cannot
be sure of remembering my mother's words
accurately.
73. But when I was in Perth, there were
still — Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked
after us children when Mause was too busy ;
James and John, William and Andrew ; (I
can't think whom the unapostolic William was
named after). But the boys were then all at
school or college, — the scholars, William and
Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and
me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears ; the
collegians were wholly abstract ; and the two
girls and I played in our quiet ways on the
North Inch, and by the ' Lead/ a stream
' led ' from the Tay past Rose Terrace into the
town for molinary purposes ; and long ago, I
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 87
suppose, bricked over or choked with rubbish ;
but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of
flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by
the way, was ascending towards twelve —
fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty ; and
as pious as Jessie, without being quite so
zealous.
74. My father rarely stayed with us in
Perth, but went on business travel through
Scotland, and even my mother became a curi-
ously unimportant figure at Rose Terrace. I
can't understand how she so rarely walked
with us children ; she and my aunt seemed
always to have their own secluded ways.
Mary, Jessie, and I were allowed to do what
we liked on the Inch : and I don't remember
doing any lessons in these Perth times, except
the above-described competitive divinity on
Sunday.
Had there been anybody then to teach me
anything about plants or pebbles, it had been
good for me ; as it was, I passed my days
much as the thistles and tansy did, only with
perpetual watching of all the ways of running
water, — a singular awe developing itself in
me, both of the pools of Tay, where the water
8 8 PR^ETERITA.
changed from brown to blue-black, and of the
precipices of Kinnoull ; partly out of my own
mind, and partly because the servants always
became serious when we went up Kinnoull
way, especially if I wanted to stay and
look at the little crystal spring of Bower's
Well.
75. ' But you say you were not afraid of
anything?' writes a friend, anxious for the
unassailable veracity of these memoirs. Well,
I said, not of ghosts, thunder, or beasts, —
meaning to specify the commonest terrors of
mere childhood. Every day, as 1 grew wiser,
taught me a reasonable fear ; else I had not
above described myself as the most reason-
able person of my acquaintance. And by the
swirls of smooth blackness, broken by no
fleck of foam, where Tay gathered herself like
Medusa,* I never passed without awe, even
in those thoughtless days ; neither do I in the
least mean that I could walk among tomb-
stones in the night (neither, for that matter,
in the day), as if they were only paving
stones set upright. Far the contrary; but it
* I always think of Tay as a goddess river, as Greta a
nymph one.
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 89
is important to the reader's confidence in
writings which have seemed inordinately im-
pressional and emotional, that he should know
I was never subject to — I should perhaps
rather say, sorrowfully, never capable of — any
manner of illusion or false imagination, nor in
the least liable to have my nerves shaken by
surprise. When I was about five years old,
having been on amicable terms for a while
with a black Newfoundland, then on probation
for watch dog at Heme Hill ; after one of our
long summer journeys my first thought on
getting home was to go to see Lion. My
mother trusted me to go to the stable with our
one serving-man, Thomas, giving him strict
orders that I was not to be allowed within
stretch of the dog's chain. Thomas, for
better security, carried me in his arms. Lion
was at his dinner, and took no notice of either
of us; on which I besought leave to pat him.
Foolish Thomas stooped towards him that I
might, when the dog instantly flew at me, and
bit a piece clean out of the corner of my lip
on the left side. I was brought up the back
stairs, bleeding fast, but not a whit frightened,
except lest Lion should be sent away. Lion
9 o
PRyETERITA.
indeed had to go ; but not Thomas : my
mother was sure he was sorry, and I think
blamed herself the most. The bitten side of
the (then really pretty) mouth, was spoiled for
evermore, but the wound, drawn close, healed
quickly; the last use I made of my move-
able lips before Dr. Aveline drew them into
ordered silence for a while, was to observe,
' Mama, though I can't speak, I can play
upon the fiddle.' But the house was of
another opinion, and I never attained any
proficiency upon that instrument worthy of
my genius. Not the slightest diminution of
my love of dogs, nor the slightest nervous-
ness in managing them, was induced by the
accident.
I scarcely know whether I was in any real
danger or not when, another day, in the same
stable, quite by myself, I went head foremost
into the large water-tub kept for the garden.
I think I might have got awkwardly wedged
if I had tried to draw my feet in after me :
instead, I used the small watering-pot I had
in my hand to give myself a good thrust up
from the bottom, and caught the opposite edge
of the tub with my left hand, getting not a
III. THE BANKS OF TAY. 9 1
little credit afterwards for my decision of
method. Looking back to the few chances
that have in any such manner tried my head,
I believe it has never failed me when I wanted
it, and that I am much more likely to be con-
fused by sudden admiration than by sudden
danger.
j6. The dark pools of Tay, which have led
me into this boasting, were under the high
bank at the head of the North Inch, — the
path above them being seldom traversed
by us children unless at harvest time,
when we used to go gleaning in the fields
beyond ; Jessie and I afterwards grinding
our corn in the kitchen pepper-mill, and
kneading and toasting for ourselves cakes
of pepper bread, of quite unpurchaseable
quality.
In the general course of this my careful
narration, I rebut with as much indignation
as may be permitted without ill manners, the
charge of partiality to anything merely because
it was seen when I was young. I hesitate,
however, in recording as a constant truth for
the world, the impression left on me when
I went gleaning with Jessie, that Scottish
92 PRjETERITA.
sheaves are more golden than are bound in
other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere
visible to human eyes are so like the 'corn
of heaven ' * as those of Strath-Tay and
Strath-Earn.
* Psalm Ixxviii. 24.
CHAPTER IV.
UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS.
yj. WHEN I was about eight or nine I had
a bad feverish illness at Dunkeld, during
which I believe I was in some danger, and am
sure I was very uncomfortable. It came on
after a long walk in which I had been gather-
ing quantities of foxgloves and pulling them
to pieces to examine their seeds, and there
were hints about their having poisoned me ;
very absurd, but which extended the gather-
ing awe from river eddies to foxglove dells.
Not long after that, when we were back
at home, my cousin Jessie fell ill, and died
very slowly, of water on the brain. I was
very sorry, not so much in any strength
of early affection, as in the feeling that the
happy, happy days at Perth were for ever
ended, since there was no more Jessie.
Before her illness took its fatal form, —
before, indeed, I believe it had at all declared
93
94 PR^TERITA.
itself — my aunt dreamed one of her foresight
dreams, simple and plain enough for any one's
interpretation ; — that she was approaching the
ford of a dark river, alone, when little Jessie
came running up behind her, and passed her,
and went through first. Then she passed
through herself, and looking back from the
other side, saw her old Mause approaching
from the distance to the bank of the stream.
And so it was, that Jessie, immediately after-
wards, sickened rapidly and died ; and a few
months, or it might be nearly a year after-
wards, my aunt died of decline ; and Mause,
some two or three years later, having had no
care after her mistress and Jessie were gone,
but when she might go to them.
78. I was at Plymouth with my father and
mother when my Scottish aunt died, and had
been very happy with my nurse on the hill
east of the town, looking out on the bay and
breakwater; and came in to find my father,
for the first time I had ever seen him, in deep
distress of sobbing tears.
I was very sorry that my aunt was dead,
but, at that time, (and a good deal since, also,)
I lived mostly in the present, like an animal,
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. 95
and my principal sensation was, — What a pity
it was to pass such an uncomfortable evening
— and we at Plymouth !
The deaths of Jessie and her mother of
course ended our Scottish days. The only
surviving daughter, Mary, was thenceforward
adopted by my father and mother, and
brought up with me. She was fourteen when
she came to us, and I four years younger; —
so with the Perth days, closed the first decade
of my life. Mary was a rather pretty, blue-
eyed, clumsily-made girl, very amiable and
affectionate in a quiet way, with no parts, but
good sense and good principle, honestly and
inoffensively pious, and equal tempered, but
with no pretty girlish ways or fancies. She
became a serene additional neutral tint in the
household harmony; read alternate verses of
the Bible with my mother and me in the
mornings, and went to a day school in the
forenoon. When we travelled she took some-
what of a governess position towards me, we
being allowed to explore places together with-
out my nurse ; — but we generally took old
Anne too for better company.
79. It began now to be of some importance
96 PRiETERITA.
what church I went to on Sunday morning.
My father, who was still much broken in
health, could not go to the long Church of
England service, and, my mother being
evangelical, he went contentedly, or at least
submissively, with her and me to Beresford
Chapel, Walworth, where the Rev. D. Andrews
preached, regularly, a somewhat eloquent,
forcible, and ingenious sermon, not tiresome
to him : — the prayers were abridged from the
Church Service, and we, being the grandest
people in the congregation, were allowed —
though, as I now remember, not without
offended and reproachful glances from the
more conscientious worshippers — to come in
when even those short prayers were half over.
Mary and I used each to write an abstract of
the sermon in the afternoon, to please our-
selves, — Mary dutifully, and I to show how
well I could do it. We never went to church
in afternoon or evening. •■ I remember yet the
amazed and appalling sensation, as of a vision
preliminary to the Day of Judgment, of going,
a year or two later, first into a church by
candlelight]
80. We had no family worship, but our
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. CfJ
servants were better cared for than is often
the case in ostentatiously religious houses.
My mother used to take them, when girls, from
families known to her, sister after sister, and
we never had a bad one.
On the Sunday evening my father would
sometimes read us a sermon of Blair's, or it
might be, a clerk or a customer would dine
with us, when the conversation, in mere
necessary courtesy, would take generally the
direction of sherry. Mary and I got through
the evening how we could, over the Pilgrim's ./
Progress, Bunyan's Holy War, Quarles's
Emblems, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Mrs. Sher-
wood's Lady of the Manor, — a very awful
book to me, because of the stories in it of
wicked girls who had gone to balls, dying im-
mediately after of fever, — and Mrs. Sherwood's
Henry Milner, — of which more presently, —
the Youth's Magazine, Alfred Campbell the
young pilgrim, and, though rather as a profane
indulgence, permitted because of the hardness
of our hearts, Bingley's Natural History. We
none of us cared for singing hymns or
psalms as such, and were too honest to
amuse ourselves with them as sacred music,
vol. i. G
98 PR^TERITA.
besides that we did not find their music
amusing.
8 1. My father and mother, though due
cheques for charities were of course sent to
Dr. Andrews, and various civilities at Christ-
mas, in the way of turkeys or boxes of raisins,
intimated their satisfaction with the style of
his sermons and purity of his doctrine, — had
yet, with their usual shyness, never asked for
his acquaintance, or even permitted the state
of their souls to be inquired after in pastoral
visits. Mary and I, however, were charmed
merely by the* distant effect of him, and used
to walk with Anne up and down in Walworth,
merely in the hope of seeing him pass on the
other side of the way. At last, one day, when,
by extreme favour of Fortune, he met us in a
great hurry on our own side of it, and nearly
tumbled over me, Anne, as he recovered
himself, dropped him a low curtsey ; where-
upon he stopped, inquired who we were, and
was extremely gracious to us ; and we, coming
home in a fever of delight, announced, not
much to my mother's satisfaction, that the
Doctor had said he would call some day ! And
so, little by little, the blissful acquaintance was
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. 99
made. I might be eleven or going on twelve
by that time. Miss Andrews, the eldest sister
of the " Angel in the House," was an extremely
beautiful girl of seventeen; she sang "Tam-
bourgi, Tambourgi " * with great spirit and a
rich voice, went at blackberry time on rambles
with us at the Norwood Spa, and made me
feel generally that there was something in
girls that I did not understand, and that was
curiously agreeable. And at last, because I
was so fond of the Doctor, and he had the
reputation (in Walworth) of being a good
scholar, my father thought he might pleasantly
initiate me in Greek, such initiation having
been already too long deferred. The Doctor,
it afterwards turned out, knew little more of
Greek than the letters, and declensions of
nouns ; but he wrote the letters prettily, and
had an accurate and sensitive ear for rhythm.
He began me with the odes of Anacreon,
and made me scan both them and my Virgil
thoroughly, sometimes, by way of interlude,
reciting bits of Shakespeare to me with force
and propriety. The Anacreontic metre en-
tirely pleased me, nor less the Anacreontic
* Hebrew melodies.
I OO PRJETERITA.
sentiment. I learned half the odes by heart
merely to please myself, and learned with
certainty, what in later study of Greek art it
has proved extremely advantageous to me to
know, that the Greeks liked doves, swallows,
and roses just as well as I did.
82. In the intervals of these unlaborious
Greek lessons, I went on amusing myself —
partly in writing English doggerel, partly in
map drawing, cr copying Cruikshank's illus-
trations to Grimm, which I did with great,
and to most people now incredible, exactness,
a sheet of them being, by good hap, well
preserved, done when I was between ten and
eleven. But I never saw any boy's work in
my life showing so little original faculty, or
grasp by memory. I could literally draw
nothing, not a cat, not a mouse, not a boat,
not a bush, ' out of my head,' and there was,
luckily, at present no idea on the part either
of parents or preceptor, of teaching me to
draw out of other people's heads.
Nevertheless, Mary, at her day school, was
getting drawing lessons with the other girls.
Her report of the pleasantness and zeal of
the master, and the frank and somewhat
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. IOI
unusual execution of the drawings he gave
her to copy, interested my father, and he was
still more pleased by Mary's copying, for a
proof of industry while he was away on his
winter's journey — copying, in pencil so as to
produce the effect of a vigorous engraving, the
little water-colour by Prout of a wayside
cottage, which was the foundation of our
future water-colour collection, being then our
only possession in that kind — of other kind,
two miniatures on ivory completed our gallery.
83. I perceive, in thinking over the good
work of that patient black and. white study,
that Mary could have drawn, if she had been
well taught and kindly encouraged. But her
power of patient copying did not serve her
in drawing from nature, and when, that same
summer, I between ten and eleven (1829), we
went to stay at Matlock in Derbyshire, all
that she proved able to accomplish was an
outline of Caxton's New Bath Hotel, in which
our efforts in the direction of art, for that
year, ended.
But, in the glittering white broken spar,
specked with galena, by which the walks of
the hotel garden were made bright, and in
102 PRJETERITA.
the shops of the pretty village, and in many
a happy walk among its cliffs, I pursued my
mineralogical studies on fluor, calcite, and the
ores of lead, with indescribable rapture when
I was allowed to go into a cave. My father
and mother showed far more kindness than I
knew, in yielding to my subterranean passion ;
for my mother could not bear dirty places,
and my father had a nervous feeling that the
ladders would break, or the roof fall, before
we got out again. They went with me, never-
theless, wherever I wanted to go, — my father
even into the terrible Speedwell mine at
Castleton, where, for once, I was a little
frightened myself.
From Matlock we must have gone on to
Cumberland, for I find in my father's writing
the legend, "Begun 28th November, 1830,
finished nth January, 1832," on the fly-leaf
of the ' Iteriad/ a poem in four books, which
I indited, between those dates, on the subject
of our journey among the Lakes, and of which
some little notice may be taken farther on.
84. It must have been in the spring of
1 83 1 that the important step was taken of
giving me a drawing master. Mary showed
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. IO3
no gift of representing any of the scenes of
our travels, and I began to express some
wish that I could draw myself. Whereupon,
Mary's pleasant drawing master, to whom my
father and mother were equitable enough not
to impute Mary's want of genius, was invited
to give me also an hour in the week.
I suppose a drawing master's business can
only become established by his assertion of
himself to the public as the possessor of a
style ; and teaching in that only. Neverthe-
less, Mr. Runciman's memory sustains disgrace
in my mind in that he gave no impulse nor
even indulgence to the extraordinary gift I
had for drawing delicately with the pen point.
Any work of that kind was done thenceforward
only to please myself. Mr. Runciman gave me
nothing but his own mannered and inefficient
drawings to copy, and greatly broke the force
both of my mind and hand.
Yet he taught me much, and suggested
more. He taught me perspective, at once
accurately and simply — an invaluable bit of
teaching. He compelled me into a Swiftness
and facility of hand which I found afterwards
extremely useful, though what I have just
1 04 PRiETERITA.
called the ' force,' the strong accuracy of my
line, was lost. He cultivated in me, — indeed
founded, — the habit of looking for the essential
points in the things drawn, so as to abstract
them decisively, and he explained to me the
meaning and importance of composition, though
he himself could not compose.
85. A very happy time followed, for about
two years.
I was, of course, far behind Mary in touch-
skill of pencil drawing, and it was good for
her that this superiority was acknowledged,
and due honour done her for the steady pains
of her unimpulsive practice and unwearied
attention. For, as she did not write poems
like me, nor collect spars like me, nor exhibit
any prevailing vivacity of mind in any direc-
tion, she was gradually sinking into far too
subordinate a position to my high-mightiness.
But I could make no pretence for some time
to rival her in free-hand copying, and my first
attempts from nature were not felt by my
father to be the least flattering to his vanity.
These were made under the stimulus of
a journey to Dover with the forethought of
which my mother comforted me through an
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. 105
illness of 1829. I find my quite first sketch-
book, an extremely inconvenient upright small
octavo in mottled and flexible cover, the paper
pure white, and ribbedly gritty, filled with out-
lines, irregularly defaced by impulsive efforts
at finish, in arbitrary places and corners, of
Dover and Tunbridge Castles and the main
tower of Canterbury Cathedral. These, with
a really good study, supplemented by detached
detail, of Battle Abbey, I have set aside for
preservation; the really first sketch I ever
made from nature being No. 1, of a street
in Sevenoaks. I get little satisfaction and less
praise by these works ; but the native archi-
tectural instinct is instantly developed in these
— highly notable for any one who cares to
note such nativities. Two little pencillings
from Canterbury south porch and central
tower, I have given to Miss Gale, of Burgate
House, Canterbury ; the remnants of the book
itself to Mrs. Talbot, of Tyn-y-Ffynon, Bar-
mouth, both very dear friends.
86. But before everything, at this time, came
my pleasure in merely watching the sea. I
was not allowed to row, far less to sail, nor
to walk near the harbour alone; so that I
I 06 PRjETERITA.
learned nothing of shipping or anything else
worth learning, but spent four or five hours
every day in simply staring and wondering
at the sea, — an occupation which never failed
me till I was forty. Whenever I could get
to a beach it was enough for me to have the
waves to look at, and hear, and pursue and
fly from. I never took to natural history of
shells, or shrimps, or weeds, ot jelly-fish.
Pebbles ? — yes if there were any ; otherwise,
merely stared all day long at the tumbling
and creaming strength of the sea. Idiotically,
it now appears to me, wasting all that priceless
youth in mere dream and trance of admiration ;
it had a certain strain of Byronesque passion
in it, which meant something : but it was a
fearful loss of time.
87. The summer of 1832 must, I think,
have been passed at home, for my next
sketch-book contains only some efforts at
tree-drawing in Dulwich, and a view of the
bridge over the now bricked-up ' Effra,' by
which the Norwood road then crossed it at
the bottom of Heme Hill : the road itself, just
at the place where, from the top of the bridge,
one looked up and down the streamlet,
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. I O?
bridged now into putridly damp shade by the
railway, close to Heme Hill Station. This
sketch was the first in which I was ever
supposed to show any talent for drawing.
But on my thirteenth (?) birthday, 8th
February, 1832, my father's partner, Mr.
Henry Telford, gave me Rogers' Italy, and
determined the main tenor of my life.
At that time I had never heard of Turner,
except in the well remembered saying of Mr.
Runciman's, that ' the world had lately been
much dazzled and led away by some splendid
ideas thrown out by Turner.' But I had no
sooner cast eyes on the Rogers vignettes than
I took them for my only masters, and set
myself to imitate them as far as I possibly
could by fine pen shading.
88. I have told this story so often that I
begin to doubt its time. It is curiously tire-
some that Mr. Telford did not himself write
my name in the book, and my father, who
writes in it, ' The gift of Henry Telford, Esq.,'
still more curiously, for him, puts no date :
if it was a year later, no matter; there is
no doubt however that early in the spring
of 1833 Prout published his Sketches in
108 PR^JTERITA.
Flanders and Germany. I well remember
going with my father into the shop where
subscribers entered their names, and being
referred to the specimen print, the turreted
window over the Moselle, at Coblentz. We
got the book home to Heme Hill before the
time of our usual annual tour; and as my
mother watched my father's pleasure and mine
in looking at the wonderful places, she said,
why should not we go and see some of them
in reality ? My father hesitated a little,
then with glittering eyes said — why not ? And
there were two or three weeks of entirely
rapturous and amazed preparation. I recol-
lect that very evening bringing down my big
geography book, still most precious to me ;
(I take it down now, and for the first time put
my own initials under my father's name in
it) — and looking with Mary at the outline of
Mont Blanc, copied from Saussure, at p. 201,
and reading some of the very singular infor-
mation about the Alps which it illustrates.
So that Switzerland must have been at once
included in the plans, — soon prosperously,
and with result of all manner of good, by
God's help fulfilled.
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. 1 09
89. We went by Calais and Brussels to
Cologne ; up the Rhine to Strasburg, across
the Black Forest to Schaffhausen, then made
a sweep through North Switzerland by Basle,
Berne, Interlachen, Lucerne, Zurich, to Con-
stance, — following up the Rhine still to Coire,
then over Splugen to Como, Milan, and Genoa ;
meaning, as I now remember, for Rome. But,
it being June already, the heat of Genoa
warned us of imprudence : we turned, and
came back over the Simplon to Geneva, saw
Chamouni, and so home by Lyons and Dijon.
To do all this in the then only possible
way, with post-horses, and, on the lakes, with
oared boats, needed careful calculation of time
each day. My father liked to get to our
sleeping place as early as he could, and never
would stop the horses for me to draw anything
(the extra pence to postillion for waiting being
also an item of weight in his mind); — thus I
got into the bad habit, yet not without its
discipline, of making scrawls as the carriage
went along, and working them up ' out of my
head ' in the evening. I produced in this
manner, throughout the journey, some thirty
sheets or so of small pen and Indian ink
I IO PR.ETERITA.
drawings, four or five in a sheet ; some not
inelegant, all laborious, but for the most part
one just like another, and without exception
stupid and characterless to the last degree.
90. With these flying scrawls on the road,
I made, when staying in towns, some elaborate
pencil and pen outlines, of which perhaps
half-a-dozen are worth register and preserva-
tion. My father's pride in a study of the
doubly-towered Renaissance church of Dijon
was great. A still more laborious Hotel de
Ville of Brussels remains with it at Brantwood.
The drawing of that Hotel de Ville by me now
at Oxford is a copy of Prout's, which I made
in illustration of the volume in which I wrote
the beginning of a rhymed history of the
tour.
For it had excited all the poor little faculties
that were in me to their utmost strain, and I
had certainly more passionate happiness, of
a quality utterly indescribable to people who
never felt the like, and more, in solid quantity,
in those three months, than most people have
in all their lives. The impression of the Alps
first seen from Schaffhausen, of Milan and
of Geneva, I will try to give some account
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. I I I
of afterwards, — my first business now is to
get on.
91. The winter of '33, and what time I
could steal to amuse myself in, out of '34,
were spent in composing, writing fair, and
drawing vignettes for the decoration of the
aforesaid poetical account of our tour, in
imitation of Rogers' Italy. The drawings
were made on separate pieces of paper and
pasted into the books ; many have since been
taken out, others are there for which the
verses were never written, for I had spent
my fervour before I got up the Rhine. I
leave the unfinished folly in Joanie's care,
that none but friends may see it.
Meantime, it having been perceived by my
father and mother that Dr. Andrews could
neither prepare me for the University, nor
for the duties of a bishopric, I was sent as
a day scholar to the private school kept by
the Rev. Thomas Dale, in Grove Lane, within
walking distance of Heme Hill. Walking
down with my father after breakfast, carrying
my blue bag of books, I came home to half-
past one dinner, and prepared my lessons
in the evening for next day. Under these
I I 2 PRiETERITA.
conditions I saw little of my fellow-scholars,
the two sons of Mr. Dale, Tom and James ; and
three boarders, the sons of Colonel Matson,
of Woolwich ; of Alderman Key, of Denmark
Hill ; and a fine lively boy, Willoughby Jones,
afterwards Sir W., and only lately, to my
sorrow, dead.
92. Finding me in all respects what boys
could only look upon as an innocent, they
treated me as I suppose they would have
treated a girl ; they neither thrashed nor
chaffed me, — finding, indeed, from the first
that chaff had no effect on me. Generally I
did not understand it, nor in the least mind
it if I did, the fountain of pure conceit in my
own heart sustaining me serenely against all
deprecation, whether by master or companion.
I was fairly intelligent of books, had a good
quick and holding memory, learned whatever
I was bid as fast as I could, and as well ; and
since all the other boys learned always as
little as they could, though I was far in retard
of them in real knowledge, I almost always
knew the day's lesson best. I have already
described, in the first chapter of Fiction Fair
and Foul, Mr. Dale's rejection of my clearly
/
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. I I 3
known old grammar as a 'Scotch tiling.' In
that one action he rejected himself from being
my master ; and I thenceforward learned all
he told me only because I had to do it.
93. While these steps were taken for my
classical advancement, a master was found
for me, still in that unlucky Walworth, to
teach me mathematics. Mr. Rowbotham was
an extremely industrious, deserving, and fairly
well-inibrmed person in his own branches,
who, with his wife, and various impediments
and inconveniences in the way of children,
kept a 'young gentleman's Academy' near the
Elephant and Castle, in one of the first houses
which have black plots of grass in front, fenced
by iron railings from the Walworth Road.
He knew Latin, German, and French
grammar ; was able to teach the ' use of the
globes ' as far as needed in a preparatoiy
school, and was, up to far be}ond the point
needed for me, a really sound mathematician.
For the rest, utterly unacquainted with men or
their history, with nature and its meanings ;
stupid and disconsolate, incapable of any
manner of mirth or fancy, thinking mathe-
matics the only proper occupation of human
vol. 1. H
I I 4 PRiETERITA.
intellect, asthmatic to a degree causing often
helpless suffering, and hopelessly poor, spend-
ing his evenings, after his school-drudgery
was over, in writing manuals of arithmetic
and algebra, and compiling French and German
grammars, which he allowed the booksellers to
cheat him out of, — adding perhaps, with all
his year's lamp-labour, fifteen or twenty pounds
to his income ; — a more wretched, innocent,
patient, insensible, unadmirable, uncomfortable,
intolerable being never was produced in this
sera of England by the culture characteristic
of her metropolis.
94. Under the tuition, twice a week in the
evening, of Mr. Rowbotham, (invited always
to substantial tea with us before the lesson as
a really efficient help to his hungry science,
after the walk up Heme Hill, painful to
asthma,) I prospered fairly in 1834, picking up
some bits of French grammar, of which I had
really felt the want, — I had before got hold,
somehow, of words enough to make my way
about with, — and I don't know how, but I
recollect, at Paris, going to the Louvre under
charge of Salvador, (I wanted to make a sketch
from Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus,) and
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. I I 5
on Salvador's application to the custode for
permission, it appeared I was not old enough
to have a ticket, — fifteen was then the earliest
admission-age ; but seeing me look woebegone,
the good-natured custode said he thought if
I went in to the 'Board,' or whatever it was,
of authorities, and asked for permission myself,
they would give it me. Whereupon I instantly
begged to be introduced to the Board, and the
custode taking me in under his coat lappets, I
did verily, in what broken French was feasible
to me, represent my case to several gentlemen
of an official and impressive aspect, and got
my permission, and outlined the Supper at
Emmaus with some real success in expression,
and was extremely proud of myself. But my
narrow knowledge of the language, though
thus available for business, left me sorrowful
and ashamed after the fatal dinner at Mr.
Domecq's, when the little Elise, then just nine,
seeing that her elder sisters did not choose to
trouble themselves with me, and being herself
of an entirely benevolent and pitiful temper,
came across the drawing-room to me in my
desolation, and leaning an elbow on my
knee, set herself deliberately to chatter to me
I I 6 PRiETERITA.
mellifluously for an hour and a half by the time-
piece, — requiring no answer, of which she saw
I was incapable, but satisfied with my grateful
and respectful attention, and admiring interest,
if not exactly always in what she said, at least
in the way she said it. She gave me the
entire history of her school, and of the objec-
tionable characters of her teachers, and of the
delightful characters of her companions, and
of the mischief she got into, and the surrepti-
tious enjoyments they devised, and the joys of
coming back to the Champs Elysees, and the
general likeness of Paris to the Garden of
Edenj And the hour and a half seemed but
too short, and left me resolved, anyhow, to do
my best to learn French.
95. So, as I said, I progressed in this stud}'
to the contentment of Mr. Rowbotham, went
easily through the three first books of Euclid,
and got as far as quadratics in Algebra. But
there I stopped, virtually, for ever. The
moment I got into sums of series, or symbols
expressing the relations instead of the real
magnitudes of things, — partly in want of
faculty, partly in an already well-developed
and healthy hatred of things vainly bothering
IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS. I I 7
and intangible, — I jibbed — or stood stunned.
Afterwards at Oxford tbey dragged me through
some conic sections, of which the facts re-
presentable by drawing became afterwards of
extreme value to me ; and taught me as much
trigonometry as made my mountain work, in
plan and elevation, unaccusable. In elemen-
tary geometry I was always happy, and, for
a boy, strong ; and my conceit, developing
now every hour more venomously as I began
to perceive the weaknesses of my masters,
led me to spend nearly every moment I could
command for study in my own way, through
the year 1835, in trying to trisect an angle.
For some time afterwards I had the sense to
reproach myself for the waste of thoughtful
hours in that year, little knowing or dreaming
how many a year to come, from that time
forth, was to be worse wasted.
While the course of my education was
thus daily gathering the growth of me into
a stubborn little standard bush, various frost-
stroke was stripping away from me the poor
little flowers — or herbs — of the forest, that
had once grown, happily for me, at my side.
!
CHAPTER V.
PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON.
96. I HAVE allowed, in the last chapter, my
record of boyish achievements and experiments
in art to run on to a date much in advance
of the early years which were most seriously
eventful for me in good and evil. I resume
the general story of them with the less hesita-
tion, because, such as it is, nobody else can
tell it ; while, in later years, my friends in
some respects know me better than I know
myself.
The second decade of my life was cut away
still more sharply from the perfectly happy
time of childhood, by the death of my Croydon
aunt ; death of ' cold ' literally, caught in some
homely washing operations in an east wind.
Her brown and white spaniel, Dash, lay beside
her body, and on her coffin, till they were
taken away from him ; then he was brought
to Heme Hill, and 1 think had been my
us
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNL1MMON. I 19
companion some time before Mary came
to us.
With the death of my Croyo'on aunt ended
for me all the days by Wan del streams, as
at Perth by Tay ; and thus when I was ten
years old, an exclusively Heme Hill- .top life
set in (when we were not travelling), of no
very beneficial character.
97. My Croydon aunt left four sons — John,
William, George, and Charles ; and two
daughters — Margaret and Bridget. All hand-
some lads and pretty lasses ; but Margaret,
in early youth, met with some mischance
that twisted her spine, and hopelessly de-
formed her. She was clever, and witty, like
her mother ; but never of any interest to me,
though I gave a kind of brotherly, rather than
cousinly, affection to all my Croydon cousins.
But I never liked invalids, and don't to this
day ; and Margaret used to wear her hair in
ringlets, which I couldn't bear the sight of.
Bridget was a very different creature ; a
black-eyed, or, with precision, dark hazel-
eyed, slim-made, lively girl ; a little too sharp
in the features to be quite pretty, a little too
wiry-jointed to be quite graceful ; capricious,
I 2 O PR.KTERITA.
and more or less selfish in temper, yet nice
enough to be once or twice asked to Perth
with ns, or tn stay for a month or two at
Heme Hill ; but never attaching herself much
to us, neither us to her. I felt her an incon-
venience in my nursery arrangements, the
nursery having become my child's study as I
g,rew studious; and she had no mind, or, it
might be, no leave, to work with me in the
garden.
98. The four boys were all of them good,
and steadily active. The eldest, John, with
wider business habits than the rest, went soon
to push his fortune in Australia, and did
so ; the second, William, prospered also in
London.
The third brother, George, was the best of
boys and men, but of small wit. He ex-
tremely resembled a rural George the Fourth,
with an expansive, healthy, benevolent eager-
ness of simplicity in his face, greatly bettering
him as a type of British character. He went
into the business in Market Street, with his
father, and both were a great joy to all of us
in their affection ateness and truth : neither of
them in all their lives ever did a dishonest,
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. I 2 I
unkind, or otherwise faultful thing — but still
less a clever one ! For the present, I leave
them happily rilling and driving their cart of
quartern loaves in morning round from Market
Street.
99. The fourth, and youngest, Charles, was
like the last-born in a fairy tale, ruddy as the
boy David, bright of heart, not wanting in
common sense, or even in good sense ; and
affectionate, like all the rest. He took to his
schooling kindly, and became grammatical,
polite, and presentable in our high Heme Hill
circle.' His elder brother, John, had taken
care of his education in more important
matters : very early in the child's life he put
him on a barebacked pony, with the simple
elementary instruction that he should be
thrashed if he came off. And he stayed on.
Similarly, for first lesson in swimming, he
pitched the boy like a pebble into the middle
of the Croydon Canal, jumping in, of course,
after him ; but I believe the lad squattered to
the bank without help, and became when he
was only 'that high' a fearless master of
horse and wave.
100. My mother used to tell these two
I 2 2 PR^TERITA.
stories with the greater satisfaction, because,
in her own son's education, she had sacrificed
her pride in his heroism to her anxiety for his
safety ; and never allowed me to go to the
edge of a pond, or be in the same field with a
pony. As ill-luck also would have it, there
was no manner of farm or marsh near us,
which might of necessity modify these restric-
tions ; but I have already noted with thankful-
ness the good I got out of the tadpole-haunted
ditch in Croxted Lane ; while also, even
between us and tutorial Walworth, there was
one Elysian field for me in the neglected grass
of Camberwell Green. There was a pond in
the corner of it, of considerable size, and un-
known depth, — probably, even in summer, full
three feet in the middle ; the sable opacity of
its waters adding to the mystery of danger.
Large, as I said, for a pond, perhaps sixty
or seventy yards the long way of the Green,
fifty the short ; while on its western edge
grew a stately elm, from whose boughs, it
was currently reported, and conscientiously
believed, a wicked boy had fallen into the
pond on Sunday, and forthwith the soul of
him into a deeper and darker pool.
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. 123
It was one of the most valued privileges of
my early life to be permitted by my nurse to
contemplate this judicial pond with awe, from
the other side of the way. The loss of it, by
the sanitary conversion of Camberwell Green
into a bouquet for Camberwell's button-hole,
is to this day matter of perennial lament
to me.
10 1 . In the carrying out of the precautionary
laws above described I was, of course, never
allowed, on my visits to Croydon, to go out
with my cousins, lest they should lead me
into mischief; and no more adventurous joys
were ever possible to me there, than my walks
with Anne or my mother where the stream
from Scarborough pond ran across the road ;
or on the crisp turf of Duppas Hill ; my
watchings of the process of my father's draw-
ings in Indian ink, and my own untired con-
templations of the pump and gutter on the
other side of the so-called street, but really
lane, — not more than twelve feet from wall to
wall. So that, when at last it was thought
that Charles, with all his good natural gifts
and graces, should be brought from Croydon
town to London city, and initiated into the
1 24 pr#:terita.
lofty life and work of its burgess orders ; and
when, accordingly, he was, after various taking
of counsel and making of enquiry, apprenticed
to Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Co., of 65, Cornhill,
with the high privilege of coming out to dine
at Heme Hill every Sunday, the new and
beaming presence of cousin Charles became
a vivid excitement, and admirable revelation
of the activities of youth to me, and I began
to get really attached to him.
I was not myself the sort of creature that
a boy could care much for, — or indeed any
human being, except papa and mama, and
Mrs. Richard Gray (of whom more presently);
being indeed nothing more than a conceited
and unentertainingly troublesome little monkey.
But Charles was always kind to me, and natu-
rally answered with some cousinly or even
brotherly tenderness my admiration of him,
and delight in him.
102. At Messrs. Smith & Elder's he was
an admittedly exemplary apprentice, rapidly
becoming a serviceable shopman, taking orders
intelligently, and knowing well both his books
and his customers. As all right-minded ap-
prentices and good shopmen do, he took
V. PARNASSUS AND PLVNLIMMON, 125
personal pride in everything produced by the
firm ; and on Sundays always brought a
volume or two in his pocket to show us the
character of its most ambitious publications ;
especially choosing, on my behalf, any which
chanced to contain good engravings. In this
wa) f I became familiar with Stanfield and
Harding long before I possessed a single
engraving myself from either of them ; but
the really most precious, and continuous in
deep effect upon me, of all gifts to my child-
hood, was from my Croydon aunt, of the
Forget-me-not of 1827, with a beautiful en-
graving in it of Prout's ' Sepulchral monument
at Verona.'
Strange, that the true first impulse to the
most refined instincts of my mind should have
been given by my totally uneducated, but
entirely good and right-minded, mother's
sister.
103. But more magnificent results came of
Charles's literary connection, through the in-
terest we all took in the embossed and gilded
small octavo which Smith & Elder published
annually, by title ' Friendship's Offering. 5
This was edited by a pious Scotch missionary,
126 PRiETERITA.
and minor — very much minor — key, poet,
Thomas Pringle ; mentioned once or twice
with a sprinkling of honour in Lockhart's Life
of Scott. A strictly conscientious and earnest,
accurately trained, though narrowly learned,
man, with all the Scottish conceit, restlessness
for travel, and petulant courage of the Parks
and Livingstones ; with also some pretty
tinges of romance and inklings of philosophy
to mellow him, he was an admitted, though
little regarded, member of the best literary
circles, and acquainted, in the course of cater-
ing for his little embossed octavo, with every-
body in the outer circles, and lower, down to
little me. He had been patronised by Scott ;
was on terms of polite correspondence with
Wordsworth and Rogers ; of familiar inter-
course with the Ettrick Shepherd ; and had
himself written a book of poems on the
subject of Africa, in which antelopes were
called springboks, and other African manners
and customs carefully observed.
104. Partly to oblige the good-natured and
lively shopboy, who told wonderful things
of his little student cousin ; — partly in the
look-out for thin compositions of tractable
V. TARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. \2"J
stucco, wherewith to fill interstices in the
masonry of • Friendship's Offering/ Mr.
Pringle visited us at Heme Hill, heard the
traditions of my literary life, expressed some
interest in its farther progress, — and some-
times took a copy of verses away in his pocket.
He was the first person who intimated to my
father and mother, with some decision, that
there were as yet no wholly trustworthy in-
dications of my one day occupying a higher
place in English literature than either Milton
or Byron ; and accordingly I think none of
us attached much importance to his opinions.
But he had the sense to recognise, through
the parental vanity, my father's high natural
powers, and exquisitely romantic sensibility ;
nor less my mother's tried sincerity in the
evangelical faith, which he had set himself
apart to preach : and he thus became an
honoured, though never quite cordially
welcomed, guest on occasions of state Sun-
day dinner ; and more or less an adviser
thenceforward of the mode of my education,
He himself found interest enough in my real
love of nature and ready faculty of rhyme, to
induce him to read and criticize for me some of
I 2 8 PR-rtHTERITA.
my verses with attention ; and at last, as a
sacred Eleusinian initiation and Delphic pil-
grimage, to take me in his hand one day when
he had a visit to pay to the poet Rogers.
105. The old man, previously warned of
my admissible claims, in Mr. Pringle's sight,
to the beatitude of such introduction, was
sufficiently gracious to me, though the cultiva-
tion of germinating genius was never held
by Mr. Rogers to be an industry altogether
delectable to genius in its zenith. Moreover,
I was unfortunate in the line of observations
by which, in return for his notice, I endea-
voured to show myself worthy of it. I con-
gratulated him with enthusiasm on the beauty
of the engravings by which his poems were
illustrated, — but betrayed, I fear me, at the
same time some lack of an equally vivid inte-
rest in the composition of the poems them-
selves. At all events, Mr. Pringle — I thought
at the time, somewhat abruptly — diverted the
conversation to subjects connected with Africa.
These were doubtless more calculated to in-
terest the polished minstrel of St. James's
Place; but again I fell into misdemeanours by
allowing my own attention, as my wandering
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. I 29
eyes too frankly confessed, to determine itself
on the pictures glowing from the crimson-
silken walls; and accordingly, after we had
taken leave, Mr. Pringle took occasion to
advise me that, in future, when I was in
the company of distinguished men, I should
listen more attentively to their conversation.
106. These, and such other — (I have else-
where related the Ettrick Shepherd's favour-
ing visit to us, also obtained by Mr. Pringle)
— glorifications and advancements being the
reward of my literary efforts, I was neverthe-
less not beguiled by them into any abandon-
ment of the scientific studies which were
indeed natural and delightful to me. I have
above registered their beginnings in the sparry
walks at Matlock: but my father's business
also took him often to Bristol, where he
placed my mother, with Mary and me, at
Clifton. Miss Edgeworth's story of Lazy
Lawrence, and the visit to Matlock by Harry
and Lucy, gave an almost romantic and
visionary charm to mineralogy in those dells ;
and the piece of iron oxide with bright Bristol
diamonds, — No. 51 of the Brantwood collec-
tion, — was I think the first stone on which
vol. 1. j
I30 PR^TERITA.
I began my studies of silica. The diamonds
of it were bright with many an association
besides, since from Clifton we nearly always
crossed to Chepstow, — the rapture of being
afloat, for half-an-hour even, on that muddy sea,
concentrating into these impressive minutes
the pleasures of a year of other boys' boating,
— and so round by Tintern and Malvern,
where the hills, extremely delightful in them-
selves to me because I was allowed to run
free on them, there being no precipices to
fall over nor streams to fall into, were also
classical to me through Mrs. Sherwood's
' Henry Milner,' a book which I loved long,
and respect still. So that there was this of
curious and precious in the means of my edu-
cation in these years, that my romance was
always ratified to me by the seal of locality
— and every charm of locality spiritualized by
the glow and the passion of romance.
107. There was one district, however, that
of the Cumberland lakes, which needed no
charm of association to deepen the appeal of
its realities. I have said somewhere that my
first memory in life was of Friar's Crag on
Derwentwater — meaning, I suppose, my first
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. I 3 I
memory of things afterwards chiefly precious
to me; at all events, I knew Keswick before
I knew Perth, and after the Perth days were
ended, my mother and I stayed either there,
at the Royal Oak, or at Lowwood.Inn, or
at Coniston Waterhead, while my father went
on his business journeys to Whitehaven, Lan-
caster, Newcastle, and other northern towns.
The inn at Coniston was then actually at the
upper end of the lake, the road from Amble-
side to the village passing just between it
and the water; and the view of the long
reach of lake, with its softly wooded lateral
hills, had for my father a tender charm
which excited the same feeling as that with
which he afterwards regarded the lakes of
Italy. Lowwood Inn also was then little
more than a country cottage, — and Amble-
side a rural village ; and the absolute peace
and bliss which any one who cared for grassy
hills and for sweet waters might find at every
footstep, and at every turn of crag or bend
of bay, was totally unlike anything I ever
saw, or read of, elsewhere.
108. My first sight of bolder scenery was
in Wales ; and I have written, — more than it
132
PRjETERITA.
would be wise to print, — about the drive from
Hereford to Rhaiadyr, and under Plynlimmon
to Pont-y-Monach : the joy of a walk with
my father in the Sunday afternoon towards
Hafod, gashed only with some alarmed sense
of the sin of being so happy among the hills,
instead of writing out a sermon at home; —
my father's presence and countenance not
wholly comforting me, for we both of us had
alike a subdued consciousness of being pro-
fane and rebellious characters, compared to
my mother.
From Pont-y-Monach we went north,
gathering pebbles on the beach at Aberyst-
with, and getting up Cader Idris with help of
ponies : — it remained, and rightly, for many
a year after, a king of mountains to me.
Followed Harlech and its sands, Festiniog,
the pass of Aberglaslyn, and marvel of Menai
Straits and Bridge, which I looked at, then,
as Miss Edgeworth had taught me, with
reverence for the mechanical skill of man, —
little thinking, poor innocent, what use I
should see the creature putting his skill to, in
the half century to come.
The Menai Bridge it was, remember, good
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. I 3 3
reader, not tube ; — but the trim plank roadway
swinging smooth between its iron cobwebs
from tower to tower.
109. And so on to Llanberis and up Snow-
don, of which ascent I remember, as the most
exciting event, the finding for the first time in
my life a real " mineral " for myself, a piece of
copper pyrites ! But the general impression
of Welsh mountain form was so true and
clear that subsequent journeys little changed
or deepened it.
And if only then my father and mother had
seen the real strengths and weaknesses of
their little John ; — if they had given me but a
shaggy scrap of a Welsh pony, and left me in
charge of a good Welsh guide, and of his wife,
if I needed any coddling, they would have
made a man of me there and then, and after-
wards the comfort of their own hearts, and
probably the first geologist of my time in
Europe.
If only ! But they could no more have
done it than thrown me like my cousin
Charles into Croydon Canal, trusting me to
find my way out by the laws of nature.
1 10. Instead, they took me back to London,
I 34 PR.ETERITA.
and my father spared time from his business
hours, once or twice a week, to take me to
a four-square, sky-lighted, sawdust-floored
prison of a riding-school in Moorfields, the
smell of which, as we turned in at the gate of
it, was a terror and horror and abomination to
me : and there I was put on big horses that
jumped, and reared, and circled, and sidled;
and fell off them regularly whenever they did
any of those things ; and was a disgrace to
my family, and a burning shame and misery
to myself, till at last the riding-school was
given up on my spraining my right-hand fore-
finger (it has never come straight again since),
— and a well-broken Shetland pony bought for
me, and the two of us led about the Norwood
roads by a riding master with a leading string.
I used to do pretty well as long as we went
straight, and then get thinking of something,
and fall off when we turned a corner. I
might have got some inkling of a seat in
Heaven's good time, if no fuss had been made
about me, nor inquiries instituted whether I
had been off or on ; but as my mother, the
moment I got home, made searching scrutiny
into the day's disgraces, I merely got more
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. I 35
and more nervous and helpless after every
tumble ; and this branch of my education was
at last abandoned, my parents consoling them-
selves, as best they might, in the conclusion
that my not being able to learn to ride was
the sign of my being a singular genius.
in. The rest of the year was passed in
such home employment as I have above
described; — but, either in that or the pre-
ceding year, my mineralogical taste received
a new and very important impulse from a
friend who entered afterwards intimately into
our family life, but of whom I have not yet
spoken.
My illness at Dunkeld, above noticed, was
attended by two physicians, — my mother, —
and Dr. Grant. The Doctor must then have
been a youth who had just obtained his
diploma. I do not know the origin of his
acquaintance with my parents; but I know
that my father had almost paternal influence
over him ; and was of service to him, to what
extent I know not, but certainly continued
and effective, in beginning the world. And as
I grew older I used often to hear expressions
of much affection and respect for Dr. Grant
I36 PRiETERITA.
from my father and mother, coupled with
others of regret or blame that he did not
enough bring out his powers, or use his
advantages.
Ever after the Dunkeld illness, Dr. Grant's
name was associated in my mind with a
brown powder — rhubarb, or the like — of a
gritty and acrid nature, which, by his orders,
I had then to take. The name thenceforward
always sounded to me gr-r-ish and granular;
and a certain dread, not amounting to dislike
— but, on the contrary, affectionate, (for me)
— made the Doctor's presence somewhat
solemnizing to me ; the rather as he never
jested, and had a brownish, partly austere,
and sere, wrinkled, and — rhubarby, in fact,
sort of a face. For the rest, a man entirely
kind and conscientious, much affectionate to
my father, and acknowledging a sort of
ward-to-guardian's duty to him, together
with the responsibility of a medical adviser,
acquainted both with his imagination and his
constitution.
112. I conjecture that it must have been
owing to Dr. Grant's being of fairly good
family, and in every sense and every reality
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. I 37
of the word a gentleman, that, soon after
coming up to London, he got a surgeon's
appointment in one of His Majesty's frigates
commissioned for a cruise on the west coast
of South America. Fortunately the health of
her company gave the Doctor little to do pro-
fessionally ; and he was able to give most of
his time to the study of the natural history
of the coast of Chili and Peru. One of the
results of these shore expeditions was the
finding such a stag-beetle as had never be-
fore been seen. It had peculiar or colossal
nippers, and — I forget what ' chiasos ' means
in Greek, but its jaws were chiasoi. It was
brought home beautifully packed in a box of
cotton ; and, when the box was opened, ex-
cited the admiration of all beholders, and was
called the ' Chiasognathos Grantii.' A second
result was his collection of a very perfect
series of Valparaiso humming birds, out of
which he spared, for a present to my mother,
as many as filled with purple and golden
flutter two glass cases as large as Mr. Gould's
at the British Museum, which became re-
plendent decorations of the drawing-room at
Heme Hill, — were to me, as I grew older,
I38 PRiETERITA.
conclusive standards of plume texture and
colour, — and are now placed in the best
lighted recess of the parish school at Coniston.
113. The third result was more important
still. Dr. Grant had been presented by the
Spanish masters of mines with characteristic
and rich specimens of the most beautiful vein-
stones of Copiapo. It was a mighty fact for
me, at the height of my child's interest in
minerals, to see our own parlour table loaded
with foliated silver and arborescent gold. Not
only the man of science, but the latent miser
in me, was developed largely in an hour or
two ! In the pieces which Dr. Grant gave me,
I counted my treasure grain by grain ; and
recall to-day, in acute sympathy with it,
the indignation I felt at seeing no instantly
reverential change in cousin Charles's coun-
tenance, when I informed him that the film
on the surface of an unpresuming specimen,
amounting in quantity to about the sixteenth
part of a sixpence, was ' native silver ' !
Soon after his return from this prosperous
voyage, Dr. Grant settled himself in a respect-
able house half-way down Richmond Hill,
where gradually he obtained practice and
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNL1MMON. I 39
accepted position among the gentry of that
town and its parkly neighbourhood. And
every now and then, in the summer mornings,
or the gaily frost-white winter ones, we used,
papa and mamma, and Mary and I, to drive
over Clapham and Wandsworth Commons to a
breakfast picnic with Dr. Grant at the " Star
and Garter." Breakfasts much impressed on
my mind, partly by the pretty view from the
windows ; but more, because while my ortho-
dox breakfast, even in travelling, was of stale
baker's bread, at these starry picnics I was
allowed new French roll.
114. Leaving Dr. Grant, for the nonce,
under these pleasant and dignifiedly crescent
circumstances, I must turn to the friends who
of all others, not relatives, were most power-
fully influential on my child life, — Mr. and
Mrs. Richard Gray.
Some considerable time during my father's
clerkdom had been passed by him in Spain, in
learning to know sherry, and seeing the ways
of making and storing it at Xerez, Cadiz, and
Lisbon. At Lisbon he became intimate with
another young Scotsman of about his own age,
also employed, I conceive, as a clerk, in some
1 40 PRJETERITA.
Spanish house, but himself of no narrow
clerkly mind. On the contrary, Richard Gray
went far beyond my father in the romantic
sentiment, and scholarly love of good litera-
ture, which so strangely mingled with my
father's steady business habits. Equally
energetic, industrious, and high - principled,
Mr. Gray's enthusiasm was nevertheless
irregularly, and too often uselessly, coruscant ;
being to my father's, as Carlyle says of French
against English fire at Dettingen, "faggot
against anthracite." Yet, I will not venture
absolutely to maintain that, under Richard's
erratic and effervescent influence, an expedi-
tion to Cintra, or an assistance at a village
festa, or even at a bull-fight, might not some-
times, to that extent, invalidate my former
general assertion that, during nine years, my
father never had a holiday. At all events,
the young men became close and affec-
tionate friends ; and the connection had
a softening, cheering, and altogether bene-
ficent effect on my father's character. Nor
was their brotherly friendship any whit
flawed or dimmed, when, a little while
before leaving Spain, Mr. Gray married an
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. I4I
extremely good and beautiful Scotch girl,
Mary Monro.
115. Extremely good, and, in the gentlest
way ; — entirely simple, meek, loving, and
serious ; not clever enough to be any way
naughty, but saved from being stupid by a
vivid nature, full of enthusiasm like her
husband's. Both of them evangelically pious,
in a vivid, not virulent, way; and each of
them sacredly, no less than passionately, in
love with the other, they were the entirely
best-matched pair I have yet seen in this
match-making world and dispensation. Yet,
as fate would have it, they had the one grief
of having no children, which caused it, in
years to come, to be Mrs. Gray's principal
occupation in life to spoil me. By the time
I was old enough to be spoiled, Mr. Gray,
having fairly prospered in business, and come
to London, was established, with his wife, her
mother, and her mother's white French poodle,
Petite, in a dignified house in Camberwell
Grove. An entirely happy family ; old Mrs.
Monro as sweet as her daughter, perhaps
slightly wiser ; Richard rejoicing in them both
with all his heart ; and Petite, having, perhaps,
142
PRJETERITA.
as much sense as any two of them, delighted
in, and beloved by all three.
116. Their house was near the top of the
Grove, — which was a real grove in those
days, and a grand one, some three-quarters of
a mile long, steepishly down hill, — beautiful in
perspective as an unprecedently " long-drawn
aisle ; " trees, elm, wych elm, sycamore and
aspen, the branches meeting at top ; the
houses on each side with trim stone path-
ways up to them, through small plots of well-
mown grass ; three or four storied, mostly
in grouped terraces, — well-built, of sober-
coloured brick, with high and steep slated roof
— not gabled, but polygonal; all well to do, well
kept, well broomed, dignifiedly and pleasantly
vulgar, and their own Grove- world all in all to
them. It was a pleasant mile and a furlong
or two's walk from Heme Hill to the Grove ;
and whenever Mrs. Gray and my mother had
anything to say to each other, they walked —
up the hill or down — to say it; and Mr.
Gray's house was always the same to us as
our own at any time of day or night. But
our house not at all so to the Grays, having
its formalities inviolable; so that during the
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. 1 43
whole of childhood I had the sense that we
were, in some way or other, always above our
friends and relations, — more or less patroniz-
ing everybody, favouring them by our advice,
instructing them by our example, and called
upon, by what was due both to ourselves, and
the constitution of society, to keep them at a
certain distance.
117. With one exception; which I have
deep pleasure in remembering. In the first
chapter of the Antiquary, the landlord at
Queen's Ferry sets down to his esteemed
guest a bottle of Robert Cockburn's best port ;
with which Robert Cockburn duly supplied
Sir Walter himself, being at that time, if not
the largest, the leading importer of the finest
Portugal wine, as my father of Spanish. But
Mr. Cockburn was primarily an old Edinburgh
gentleman, and only by condescension a wine-
merchant ; a man of great power and pleasant
sarcastic wit, moving in the first circles of
Edinburgh ; attached to my father by many
links of association with the 'auld toun/ and
sincerely respecting him. He was much the
stateliest and truest piece of character who
ever sate at our merchant feasts.
1 44 PR^TERITA.
Mrs. Cockburn was even a little higher, — as
representative of the Scottish lady of the old
school, — indulgent yet to the new. She had
been Lord Byron's first of first loves ; she
was the Mary Duff of Lachin-y-Gair. When
I first remember her, still extremely beautiful
in middle age, full of sense ; and, though with
some mixture of proud severity, extremely
kind.
1 1 8. They had two sons, Alexander and
Archibald, both in business with their father,
both clever and energetic, but both distinctly
resolute — as indeed their parents desired —
that they would be gentlemen first, salesmen
second : a character much to be honoured and
retained among us ; nor in their case the least
ambitious or affected : gentlemen the} 7 were, —
born so, and more at home on the hills than
in the counting-house, and withal attentive
enough to their business. The house, never-
theless, did not become all that it might have
been in less well-bred hands.
The two sons, one or other, often dined
with us, and were more distinctly friends than
most of our guests. Alexander had much of
his father's humour; Archibald, a fine, young,
V. PARNASSUS AND PLYNLIMMON. 1 45
dark Highlander, was extremely delightful to
me, and took some pains with me, for the sake
of my love of Scott, telling me anything about
fishing or deer-stalking that I cared to listen
to. For, even from earliest days, I cared to
listen to the adventures of other people, though
I never coveted any for myself. I read all
Captain Marryat's novels, without ever wishing
to go to sea ; traversed the field of Waterloo
without the slightest inclination to be a soldier ;
went on ideal fishing with Isaac Walton with-
out ever casting a fly ; and knew Cooper's
' Deerslayer ' and ' Pathfinder ' almost by heart,
without handling anything but a pop-gun, or
having any paths to find beyond the solitudes
of Gipsy-Hill. I used sometimes to tell my-
self stories of campaigns in which I was an
ingenious general, or caverns in which I dis-
covered veins of gold ; but these were merely
to fill vacancies of fancy, and had no reference
whatever to things actual or feasible. I already
disliked growing older, — never expected to be
wiser, and formed no more plans for the future
than a little black silkworm does in the middle
of its first mulberry leaf.
VOL. I. K
CHAPTER VI.
SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN.
119. The visit to the field of Waterloo,
spoken of by chance in last chapter, must
have been when I was five years old, — on the
occasion of papa and mamma's taking a fancy
to see Paris in its festivities following the
coronation of Charles X. We stayed several
weeks in Paris, in a quiet family inn, and then
some days at Brussels, — but I have no memory
whatever of intermediate stages. It seems to
me, on revision of those matin times, that I
was very slow in receiving impressions, and
needed to stop two or three days at least in a
place, before I began to get a notion of it ;
but the notion, once got, was, as far as it
went, always right ; and since I had no
occasion afterwards to modify it, other im-
pressions fell away from that principal one, and
disappeared altogether. Hence what people
call my prejudiced views of things, — which
146
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. 1 47
are, in fact, the exact contrary, namely, post-
judiced. (I do not mean to introduce this
word for general service, but it saves time and
print just now.)
120. Another character of my perceptions I
find curiously steady — that I was only inte-
rested by things near me, or at least clearly
visible and present. I suppose this is so
with children generally ; but it remained — and
remains — a part of my grown-up temper. In
this visit to Paris, I was extremely taken up
with the soft red cushions of the arm-chairs,
which it took one half an hour to subside
into after sitting down, — with the exquisitely
polished floor of the salon, and the good-natured
French ' Boots ' (more properly ' Brushes '),
who skated over it in the morning till it be-
came as reflective as a mahogany table, — with
the pretty court full of flowers and shrubs in
beds and tubs, between our rez-de-chaussee
windows and the outer gate, — with a nice
black servant belonging to another family, who
used to catch the house-cat for me ; and with
an equally good-natured fille de chambre,
who used to catch it back again, for fear I
should teaze it, (her experience of English
I48 PRiETERITA.
boy-children having made her dubious of
my intentions ) ; — all these things and people
I remember, — and the Tuileries garden, and
the ' Tivoli ' gardens, where my father took me
up and down a 'Russian mountain,' and I
saw fireworks of the finest. But I remember
nothing of the Seine, nor of Notre Dame, nor
of anything in or even out of the town, except
the windmills on Mont Martre.
121. Similarly at Brussels. I recollect no
Hotel de Ville, no stately streets, no surprises,
or interests, except only the drive to Waterloo
and slow walk over the field. The defacing
mound was not then built — it was only nine
years since the fight ; and each bank and
hollow of the ground was still a true exponent
of the courses of charge or recoil. Fastened
in my mind by later reading, that sight of
the slope of battle remains to me entirely
distinct, while the results of a later examina-
tion of it after the building of the mound,
have faded mostly away.
I must also note that the rapture of getting
on board a steamer, spoken of in last letter,
was of later date ; as a child I cared more
for a beach on which the waves broke, or
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. 1 49
sands in which I could dig, than for wide
sea. There was no ' first sight ' of the sea
for me. I had gone to Scotland in Captain
Spinks' cutter, then a regular passage boat,
when I was only three years old ; but the
weather was fine, and except for the pleasure
of tattooing myself with tar among the ropes,
I might as well have been ashore.; but I
grew into the sense of ocean, as the Earth
shaker, by the rattling beach, and lisping
sand.
122. I had meant, also in this place, to
give a word or two to another poor relative,
Nanny Clowsley, an entirely cheerful old
woman, who lived, with a Dutch clock and
some old teacups, in a single room (with
small bed in alcove) on the third storey of
a gabled house, part of the group of old ones
lately pulled down on Chelsea side of Batter-
sea bridge. But I had better keep what I
have to say of Chelsea well together, early
and late ; only, in speaking of shingle, I must
note the use to me of the view out of
Nanny Clowsley's window right down upon
the Thames tide, with its tossing wherries
at the flow, and stranded barges at ebb.
I50 PR^TERITA.
And now, I must get on, and come to the
real first sights of several things.
123. I said that, for our English tours, Mr.
Telford usually lent us his chariot. But for
Switzerland, now taking Mary, we needed
stronger wheels and more room ; and for this,
and all following tours abroad, the first pre-
paration, and the beginning of delight was
the choosing a carriage to our fancy, from
the hireable reserves at Mr. Hopkinson's, of
Long Acre.
The poor modern slaves and simpletons
who let themselves be dragged like cattle,
or felled timber, through the countries they
imagine themselves visiting, can have no
conception whatever of the complex joys, and
ingenious hopes, connected with the choice
and arrangement of the travelling carriage in
old times. The mechanical questions first,
of strength — easy rolling — steady and safe
poise of persons and luggage ; the general
stateliness of effect to be obtained for the
abashing of plebeian beholders ; the cunning
design and distribution of store-cellars under
the seats, secret drawers under front windows,
invisible pockets under padded lining, safe
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. I 5 I
from dust, and accessible only by insidious
slits, or necromantic valves like Aladdin's
trap-door; the fitting of cushions where they
would not slip, the rounding of corners for
more delicate repose ; the prudent attachments
and springs of blinds ; the perfect fitting of
windows, on which one-half the comfort of
a travelling carriage really depends ;• and the
adaptation of all these concentrated luxuries
to the probabilities of who would sit where,
in the little apartment which was to be
virtually one's home for five or six months ;
— all this was an imaginary journey in itself,
with every pleasure, and none of the discom-
fort, of practical travelling.
124. On the grand occasion 01 our first
continental journey — which was meant to be
half a year long — the carriage was chosen
with, or in addition fitted with, a front seat
outside for my father and Mary, a dickey, un-
usually large, for Anne and the courier, and
four inside seats, though those in front very
small, that papa and Mary might be received
inside in stress of weather. I recollect,
when we had finally settled which carriage
we would have, the polite Mr. Hopkinson,
152 PR^TERITA.
advised of my dawning literary reputa-
tion, asking me (to the joy of my father) if
I could translate the motto of the former
possessor, under his painted arms, — " Vix ea
nostra voco" — which I accomplishing success-
fully, farther wittily observed that however
by right belonging to the former possessor,
the motto was with greater propriety applic-
able to us.
125. For a family carriage of this solid
construction, with its luggage, and load of six
or more persons, four horses were of course
necessary to get any sufficient way on it;
and half-a-dozen such teams were kept at
every post-house. The modern reader may
perhaps have as much difficulty in realizing
these savagely and clumsily locomotive periods,
though so recent, as any aspects of migratory
Saxon or Goth ; and may not think me vainly
garrulous in their description.
The French horses, and more or less those
on all the great lines of European travel-
ling, were properly stout trotting cart-
horses, well up to their work and over it ;
untrimmed, long - tailed, good - humouredly
licentious, whinnying and frolicking with each
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. I 5 3
other when they had a chance ; sagaciously
steady to their work; obedient to the voice
mostly, to the rein only for more explicitness ;
never touched by the whip, which was used
merely to express the driver's exultation in
himself and them, — signal obstructive vehicles
in front out of the way, and advise all the in-
habitants of the villages and towns traversed
on the day's journey, that persons of distinc-
tion were honouring them by their transitory
presence. If everything was right, the four
horses were driven by one postillion riding
the shaft horse ; but if the horses were young,
or the riders unpractised, there was a postillion
for the leaders also. As a rule, there were
four steady horses and a good driver, rarely
drunk, often very young, the men of stronger
build being more useful for other work, and
any clever young rider able to manage the
well-trained and merry-minded beasts, besides
being lighter on their backs. Half the weight
of the cavalier, in such cases, was in his
boots, which were often brought out slung
from the saddle like two buckets, the postillion,
after the horses were harnessed, walking along
the pole and getting into them.
154 PRETERIT A.
126. Scarcely less official, for a travelling
carriage of good class than its postillions, was
the courier, or properly, avant-courier, whose
primary office it was to ride in advance at
a steady gallop, and order the horses at each
post-house to be harnessed and ready wait-
ing, so that no time might be lost between
stages. His higher function was to make all
bargains and pay all bills, so as to save the
family unbecoming cares and mean anxieties,
besides the trouble and disgrace of trying to
speak French or any other foreign language.
He, farther, knew the good inns in each town,
and all the good rooms in each inn, so that
he could write beforehand to secure those
suited to his family. He was also, if an
intelligent man and high-class courier, well
acquainted with the proper sights to be seen in
each town, and with all the occult means to
be used for getting sight of those that weren't
to be seen by the vulgar. Murray, the reader
will remember, did not exist in those days ;
the courier was a private Murray, who knew, if
he had any wit, not the things to be seen only,
but those you would yourself best like to see,
and gave instructions to your valet-de-place
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. I 5 5
accordingly, interfering only as a higher
power in cases of difficulty needing to be
overcome by money or tact. He invariably
attended the ladies in their shopping expedi-
tions, took them to the fashionable shops, and
arranged as he thought proper the prices of
articles. Lastly, he knew, of course, all the
other high-class couriers on the road, and
told you, if you wished to know, all the
people of consideration who chanced to be
with you in the inn.
127. My father would have considered it
an insolent and revolutionary trespass on
the privileges of the nobility to have mounted
his courier to ride in advance of us ; besides
that, wisely liberal of his money for comfort
and pleasure, he never would have paid the
cost of an extra horse for show. The horses
were, therefore, ordered in advance, when
possible, by the postillions of any preceding
carriage (or, otherwise, we did not mind wait-
ing till they were harnessed), and we carried
our courier behind us in the dickey with Anne,
being in all his other functions and accom-
plishments an indispensable luxury to us.
Indispensable, first, because none of us could
I56 PR.ETERITA.
speak anything but French, and that only
enough to ask our way in ; for all specialties
of bargaining, or details of information, we
were helpless, even in France, — and might as
well have been migratory sheep, or geese, in
Switzerland or Italy. Indispensable, secondly,
to my father's peace of mind, because, with
perfect liberality 'of temper, he had a great
dislike to being over-reached. He perfectly
well knew that his courier would have his
commission, and allowed it without question ;
but he knew also that his courier would not
be cheated by other people, and was content
in his representative. Not for ostentation,
but for real enjoyment and change of sensa-
tion from his suburban life, my father liked
large rooms ; and my mother, in mere con-
tinuance of her ordinary and essential habits,
liked clean ones ; clean, and large, means a
good inn and a first floor. Also my father
liked a view from his windows, and reasonably
said, " Why should we travel to see less than
we may ? " — so that meant first floor front.
Also my father liked delicate cookery, just
because he was one of the smallest and rarest
eaters; and my mother liked good meat.
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. I 5 7
That meant, dinner without limiting price, in
reason. Also, though my father never went
into society, he all the more enjoyed getting
a glimpse, reverentially, of fashionable people
— I mean, people of rank, — he scorned fashion,
and it was a great thing to him to feel that
Lord and Lady were on the opposite
landing, and that, at any moment, he might
conceivably meet and pass them on the stairs.
Salvador, duly advised, or penetratively per-
ceptive of these dispositions of my father,
entirely pleasing and admirable to the courier
mind, had carte-blanche in all administrative
functions and bargains. We found our plea-
sant rooms always ready, our good horses
always waiting, everybody took their hats off
when we arrived and departed. Salvador
presented his accounts weekly, and they were
settled without a word of demur.
128. To all these conditions of luxury and
felicity, can the modern steam-puffed tourist
conceive the added ruling and culminating one
— that we were never in a hurry ? coupled
with the correlative power of always starting
at the hour we chose, and that if we weren't
ready, the horses would wait ? As a rule, we
I 5 8 PR^TERITA.
breakfasted at our own home time — eight ;
the horses were pawing and neighing at the
door (under the archway, I should have said)
by nine. Between nine and three, — reckoning
seven miles an hour, including stoppages, for
minimum pace, — we had done our forty to
fifty miles of journey, sate down to dinner at
four, — and I had two hours of delicious ex-
ploring by myself in the evening ; ordered in
punctually at seven to tea, and finishing my
sketches till half-past nine, — bed-time.
On longer days of journey we started at
six, and did twenty miles before breakfast,
coming in for four o'clock dinner as usual.
In a quite long day we made a second stop,
dining at any nice village hostelry, and
coming in for late tea, after doing our eighty
or ninety miles. But these pushes were
seldom made unless to get to some pleasant
cathedral town for Sunday, or pleasant Alpine
village. We never travelled on Sunday ; my
father and I nearly always went — as philo-
sophers — to mass, in the morning, and my
mother, in pure good-nature to us, (I scarcely
ever saw in her a trace of feminine curiosity,)
would join with us in some such profanity as
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. I 59
a drive on the Corso, or the like, in the after-
noon. But we all, even my father, liked a
walk in the fields better, round an Alpine
chalet village.
129. At page no I threatened more
accurate note of my first impressions of
Switzerland and Italy in 1833. Of customary
Calais I have something to say later on, —
here I note only our going up Rhine to
Strasburg, where, with all its miracles of
building, I was already wise enough to feel
the cathedral stiff and iron-worky; but was
greatly excited and impressed by the high
roofs and rich fronts of the wooden houses,
in their sudden indication of nearness to
Switzerland; and especially by finding the
scene so admirably expressed by Prout in the
36th plate of his Flanders and Germany, still
uninjured. And then, with Salvador was
held council in the inn-parlour of Strasburg,
whether — it was then the Friday afternoon
— we should push on to-morrow for our
Sunday's rest to Basle, or to Schaffhausen.
130. How much depended — if ever any-
thing 'depends' on anything else, — on the
issue of that debate ! Salvador inclined to
I 60 PR^TERITA.
the straight and level Rhine-side road, with
the luxury of the Three Kings attainable by
sunset. But at Basle, it had to be admitted,
there were no Alps in sight, no cataract
within hearing, and Salvador honourably laid
before us the splendid alternative possibility
of reaching, by traverse of the hilly road of
the Black Forest, the gates of Schaff hausen
itself, before they closed for the night.
The Black Forest! The fall of Schaff-
hausen ! The chain of the Alps ! within
one's grasp for Sunday ! What a Sunday,
instead of customary Walworth and the
Dulwich fields ! My impassioned petition at
last carried it, and the earliest morning saw
us trotting over the bridge of boats to Kehl,
and in the eastern light I well remember
watching the line of the Black Forest hills
enlarge and rise, as we crossed the plain of
the Rhine. "Gates of the hills"; opening
for me to a new life — to cease no more,
except at the Gates of the Hills whence one
returns not.
131. And so, we reached the base of the
Schwartzwald, and entered an ascending dingle;
and scarcely, I think, a quarter of an hour
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. l6l
after entering, saw our first ' Swiss cottage.' *
How much it meant to all of us, — how much
prophesied to me, no modern traveller could
the least conceive, if I spent days in trying to
tell him. A sort of triumphant shriek — like
all the railway whistles going off at once at
Clapham Junction — has gone up from the
Fooldom of Europe at the destruction of the
myth of William Tell. To us, every word of
it was true — but mythically luminous with
more than mortal truth; and here, under the
black woods, glowed the visible, beautiful,
tangible testimony to it in the purple
larch timber, carved to exquisiteness by
the joy of peasant life, continuous, motionless
there in the pine shadow on its ancestral
turf, — unassailed and unassailing, in the
blessedness of righteous poverty, of religious
peace.
The myth of William Tell is destroyed
forsooth ? and you have tunnelled Gothard,
and filled, it may be, the Bay of Uri ; — and it
was all for you and your sake that the grapes
dropped blood from the press of St. Jacob,
* Swiss, in character and real habit — the political boun-
daries are of no moment
VOL. I, L
1 62 PR^ETERITA.
and the pine club struck down horse and helm
in Morgarten Glen ?
132. Difficult enough for you to imagine,
that old travellers' time when Switzerland
was yet the land of the Swiss, and the Alps
had never been trod by foot of man. Steam,
never heard of yet, but for short fair weather
crossing at sea (were there paddle-packets
across Atlantic ? I forget). Any way, the
roads by land were safe ; and entered once
into this mountain Paradise, we wound on
through its balmy glens, past cottage after
cottage on their lawns, still glistering in the
dew.
The road got into more barren heights by
the mid-day, the hills arduous ; once or twice
we had to wait for horses, and we were still
twenty miles from Schaffhausen at sunset ;
it was past midnight when we reached her
closed gates. The disturbed porter had the
grace to open them — not quite wide enough ;
we carried away one of our lamps in collision
with the slanting bar as we drove through the
arch. How much happier the privilege of
dreamily entering a mediaeval city, though
with the loss of a lamp, than the free ingress
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. 1 63
of being jammed between a dray and a tram-
car at a railroad station !
133. It is strange that I but dimly recollect
the following morning ; I fancy we must have
gone to some sort of church or other; and
certainly, part of the day went in admiring
the bow-windows projecting into the clean
streets. None of us seem to have thought
the Alps would be visible without profane
exertion in climbing hills. We dined at four,
as usual, and the evening being entirely fine,
went out to walk, all of us, — my father and
mother and Mary and I.
We must have still spent some time in
town-seeing, for it was drawing towards sun-
set when we got up to some sort of garden
promenade — west of the town, I believe; and
high above the Rhine, so as to command the
open country across it to the south and west.
At which open country of low undulation, far
into blue, — gazing as at one of our own
distances from Malvern of Worcestershire,
or Dorking of Kent, — suddenly — behold —
beyond !
134. There was no thought in any of us
for a moment of their being clouds. They
J
1 64 PRJETERITA.
were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure
horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by
the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that
we had ever thought or dreamed, — the seen
walls of lost Eden could not have been more
beautiful to us ; not more awful, round heaven,
the walls of sacred Death.
It is not possible to imagine, in any time of
the world, a more blessed entrance into life,
for a child of such a temperament as mine.
True, the temperament belonged to the age :
a very few years, — within the hundred, —
before that, no child could have been born to
care for mountains, or for the men that lived
among them, in that way. Till Rousseau's
time, there had been no ' sentimental ' love
of nature ; and till Scott's, no such appre-
hensive love of ' all sorts and conditions of
men,' not in the soul merely, but in the flesh.
St. Bernard of La Fontaine, looking out to
Mont Blanc with his child's eyes, sees above
Mont Blanc the Madonna; St. Bernard of
Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy, but the
dead between Martigny and Aosta. ^But for
me, the Alps and their people were alike
beautiful in their snow, and their humanity ;
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. 1 65
and I wanted, neither for them nor myself,
sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks,
or of any spirits in heaven but the clouds.
135. Thus, in perfect health of life and fire
of heart, not wanting to be anything but the
boy I was, not wanting to have anything more
than I had; knowing of sorrow only just so
much as to make life serious to me, not
enough to slacken in the least its sinews ;
and with so much of science mixed with feel-
ing as to make the sight of the Alps not only
the revelation of the beauty of the earth, but
the opening of the. first page of its volume, —
I went down that evening from the garden-
terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed
X in all of it that was to be sacred and useful.
To that terrace, and the shore of the Lake
of Geneva, my heart and faith return to this
day, in every impulse that is yet nobly alive
in them, and every thought that has in it
help or peace.
136. The morning after that Sunday's eve
at Schaffhausen was also cloudless, and we
drove early to the falls, seeing again the chain
of the Alps by morning light, and learning,
at Lauffen, what an Alpine river was. Coming
1 66
PRATERITA.
out of the gorge of Balstall, I got another ever
memorable sight of the chain of the Alps, and
these distant views, never seen by the modern
traveller, taught me, and made me feel, more
than the close marvels of Thun and Inter-
lachen. It was again fortunate that we took
the grandest pass into Italy, — that the first
ravine of the main Alps I saw was the Via
Mala, and the first lake of Italy, Como.
We took boat on the little recessed lake
of Chiavenna, and rowed down the whole
way of waters, passing another Sunday at
Cadenabbia, and then, from villa to villa,
across the lake, and across, to Como, and so
to Milan by Monza.
It was then full, though early, summer
time ; and the first impression of Italy always
ought to be in her summer. It was also well
that, though my heart was with the Swiss
cottager, the artificial taste in me had been
mainly formed by Turner's rendering of those
very scenes, in Rogers' Italy. The ' Lake of
Como,' the two moonlight villas, and the
' Farewell,' had prepared me for all that was
beautiful and right in the terraced gardens,
proportioned arcades, and white spaces of
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. 1 67
sunny wall, which have in general no honest
charm for the English mind. But to me, they
were almost native through Turner, — familiar
at once, and revered. I had no idea then of
the Renaissance evil in them ; they were
associated only with what I had been told
of the ' divine art ' of Raphael and Lionardo,
and, by my ignorance of dates, associated
with the stories of Shakespeare. Portia's
villa, — Juliet's palace, — I thought to have
been like these.
Also, as noticed in the epilogue to reprint
of vol. ii. of Modern Painters, I had always
a quite true perception of size, whether in
mountains or buildings, and with the percep-
tion, joy in it ; so that the vastness of scale
in the Milanese palaces, and the ' mount of
marble, a hundred spires,' of the duomo, im-
pressed me to the full at once : and not having
yet the taste to discern good Gothic from bad,
the mere richness and fineness of lace-like
tracery against the sky was a consummate
rapture to me — how much more getting up
to it and climbing among it, with the Monte
Rosa seen between its pinnacles across the
plain !
1 68 PR.ETERITA.
137. I had been partly prepared for this
view by the admirable presentment of it in
London, a year or two before, in an exhibi-
tion, of which the vanishing has been in later
life a greatly felt loss to me, — Burford's pano-
rama in Leicester Square, which was an
educational institution of the highest and
purest value, and ought to have been sup-
ported by the Government as one of the
most beneficial school instruments in London.
There I had seen, exquisitely painted, the
view from the roof of Milan Cathedral, when
I had no hope of ever seeing the reality, but
with a joy and wonder of the deepest; — and
now to be there indeed, made deep wonder
become fathomless.
Again, most fortunately, the weather was
clear and cloudless all day long, and as the
sun drew westward, we were able to drive
to the Corso, where, at that time, the higher
Milanese were happy and proud as ours in
their park, and whence, no railway station
intervening, the whole chain of the Alps was
visible on one side, and the beautiful city with
its dominant frost-crystalline Duomo on the
other. Then the ' drive home in the open
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. I 69
carriage through the quiet twilight, up the
long streets, and round the base of the
Duomo, the smooth pavement under the
wheels adding with its silentness to the sense
of dream wonder in it all, — the perfect air in
absolute calm, the just seen majesty of encom-
passing Alps, the perfectness — so it seemed to
me — and purity, of the sweet, stately, stainless
marble against the sky. What more, what
else, could be asked of seemingly immutable
good, in this mutable world ?
138. I wish in general to avoid interference
with the reader's judgment on the matters
which I endeavour serenely to narrate; but
may, I think, here be pardoned for observ-
ing to him the advantage, in a certain way, of
the contemplative abstraction from the world
which, during this early continental travelling,
was partly enforced by our ignorance, and
partly secured by our love of comfort. There
is something peculiarly delightful — nay, de-
lightful inconceivably by the modern German-
plated and French-polished tourist, in passing
through the streets of a foreign city without
understanding a word that anybody says !
One's ear for all sound of voices then becomes
I70 FR/ETERITA.
entirely impartial ; one is not diverted by the
meaning of syllables from recognizing the -
absolute guttural, liquid, or honeyed quality of
them : while the gesture of the body and the
expression of the face have the same value for
you that they have in a pantomime ; every
scene becomes a melodious opera to you, or
a picturesquely inarticulate Punch. Consider,
also, the gain in so consistent tranquillity.
Most young people nowadays, or even lively
old ones, travel more in search of adventures
than of information. One of my most valued
records of recent wandering is a series of
sketches by an amiable and extremely clever
girl, of the things that happened to her people
and herself every day that they were abroad.
Here it is brother Harry, and there it is
mamma, and now paterfamilias, and now her
little graceful self, and anon her merry or re-
monstrant sisterhood, who meet with enchant-
ing hardships, and enviable misadventures ;
bind themselves with fetters of friendship,
and glance into sparklings of amourette, with
any sort of people in conical hats and fringy
caps : and it is all very delightful and con-
descending; and, of course, things are learnt
VI. SCHAFFHAUSEN AND MILAN. I 7 I
about the country that way which can be
learned in no other way, but only about that
part of it which interests itself in }'ou, or
which you have pleasure in being acquainted
with. Virtually, you are thinking of yourself
all the time ; you necessarily talk to the cheer-
ful people, not to the sad ones ; and your
head is for the most part vividly taken up
with very little things. I don't say that our
isolation was meritorious, or that people in
general should know no language but their
own. Yet the meek ignorance has these ad-
vantages. We did not travel for adventures,
nor for company, but to see with our eyes,
and to measure with our hearts. If you have
sympathy, the aspect of humanity is more
true to the depths of it than its words ; and
even in my own land, the things in which I
have been least deceived are those which I
have learned as their Spectator.
CHAPTER VII.
PAPA AND MAMMA.
139. THE work to which, as partly above
described, I set myself during the year 1834
under the excitement remaining from my
foreign travels, was in four distinct directions,
in any one of which my strength might at that
time have been fixed by definite encourage-
ment. There was first the effort to express
sentiment in rhyme ; the sentiment being
really genuine, under all the superficial vani-
ties of its display ; and the rhymes rhythmic,
only without any ideas in them. It was im-
possible to explain, either to myself or other
people, why I liked staring at the sea, or
scampering on a moor ; but, one had pleasure
in making some sort of melodious noise about
it, like the waves themselves, or the peewits.
Then, secondly, there was the real love of en-
graving, and of such characters of surface and
shade as it could give. I have never seen
172
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. I 73
drawing, by a youth, so entirely industrious
in delicate line ; and there was really the
making of a fine landscape, or figure outline,
engraver in me. But fate having ordered
otherwise, I mourn the loss to engraving less
than that before calculated, or rather incal-
culable, one, to geology ! Then there was,
thirdly, the violent instinct for architecture ;
but I never could have built or carved any-
thing, because I was without power of design ;
and have perhaps done as much in that direc-
tion as it was worth doing with so limited
faculty. And then, fourthly, there was the un-
abated, never to be abated, geological instinct,
now fastened on the Alps. My fifteenth
birthday gift being left to my choice, I asked
for Saussure's ' Voyages dans les Alpes/ and
thenceforward began progressive work, carry-
ing on my mineralogical dictionary by the
help of Jameson's three-volume Mineralogy,
(an entirely clear and serviceable book ;) com-
paring his descriptions with the minerals in
the British Museum, and writing my own
more eloquent and exhaustive accounts in a
shorthand of many ingeniously symbolic char-
acters, which it took me much longer to write
174 PRiKTERITA.
my descriptions in, than in common text, and
which neither I nor anybody else could read
a word of, afterwards.
140. Such being the quadrilateral plan of
my fortifiable dispositions, it is time now to
explain, with such clue as I have found to
them, the somewhat peculiar character and
genius of both my parents ; the influence of
which was more important upon me, then,
and far on into life, than any external condi-
tions, either of friendship or tutorship, whether
at the University, or in the world.
It was, in the first place, a matter of
essential weight in the determination of subse-
quent lines, not only of labour but of thought,
that while my father, as before told, gave me
the best example of emotional reading, — read-
ing, observe, proper, not recitation, which he
disdained, and I disliked, — my mother was both
able to teach me, and resolved that I should
learn, absolute accuracy of diction and pre-
cision of accent in prose ; and made me know,
as soon as I could speak plain, what I have
in all later years tried to enforce on my
readers, that accuracy of diction means accu-
racy of sensation, and precision of accent,
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. 1 75
precision of feeling. Trained, herself in girl-
hood, only at Mrs. Rice's country school, my
mother had there learned severely right prin-
ciples of truth, charity, and housewifery, with
punctilious respect for the purity of that
English which in her home surroundings she
perceived to be by no means as undefiled
as the ripples of Wandel. She was the
daughter, as aforesaid, of the early widowed
landlady of the King's Head Inn and Tavern,
which still exists, or existed a year or two
since, presenting its side to Croydon market-
place, its front and entrance door to the
narrow alley which descends, steep for pedes-
trians, impassable to carriages, from the High
Street to the lower town.
141. Thus native to the customs and dialect
of Croydon Agora, my mother, as I now read
her, must have been an extremely intelligent,
admirably practical, and naively ambitious
girl; keeping, without contention, the head-
ship of her class, and availing herself with
steady discretion of every advantage the
country school and its modest mistress could
offer her. I never in her after-life heard
her speak with regret, and seldom without
I76 PRiETERITA.
respectful praise, of any part of the discipline
of Mrs. Rice.
I do not know for what reason, or under
what conditions, my mother went to live with
my Scottish grandfather and grandmother,
first at Edinburgh, and then at the house of
Bower's Well, on the slope of the Hill of
Kinnoul, above Perth. I was stupidly and
heartlessly careless of the past history of my
family as long as I could have learnt it ; not
till after my mother's death did I begin to
desire to know what I could never more be
told.
But certainly the change, for her, was into
a higher sphere of society, — that of real,
though sometimes eccentric, and frequently
poor, gentlemen and gentlewomen. She must
then have been rapidly growing into a tall,
handsome, and very finely made girl, with a
beautiful mild firmness of expression ; a fault-
less and accomplished housekeeper, and a
natural, essential, unassailable, yet inoffensive,
prude. I never heard a single word of any
sentiment, accident, admiration, or affection
disturbing the serene tenor of her Scottish
stewardship; yet I noticed that she never
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. 1 77
spoke without some slight shyness before my
father, nor without some pleasure, to other
people, of Dr. Thomas Brown.
142. That the Professor of Moral Philo-
sophy was a frequent guest at my grand-
mother's tea-table, and fond of benignantly
arguing with Miss Margaret, is evidence
enough of the position she held in Edinburgh
circles ; her household skills and duties never
therefore neglected — rather, if anything, still
too scrupulously practised. Once, when she
had put her white frock on for dinner, and
hurried to the kitchen to give final glance
at the state and order of things there, old
Mause, having run against the white frock
with a black saucepan, and been, it seems,
rebuked by her young mistress with too
little resignation to the will of Providence in
that matter, shook her head sorrowfully,
saying, 'Ah, Miss Margaret, ye are just like
Martha, carefu' and troubled about mony
things.'
143. When my mother was thus, at twenty,
in a Desdemona-like prime of womanhood,
intent on highest moral philosophy, — "though
still the house affairs would draw her thence "
vol. 1. M
I 7 8 PRiETERITA.
— my father was a dark-eyed, brilliantly active,
and sensitive youth of sixteen. Margaret
became to him an absolutely respected and
admired — mildly liked — governess and confi-
dante. Her sympathy was necessary to him
in all his flashingly transient amours ; her
advice in all domestic business or sorrow,
and her encouragement in all his plans of
life.
These were already determined for com-
merce ; — yet not to the abandonment of liberal
study. He had learned Latin thoroughly,
though with no large range of reading, under
the noble traditions of Adams at the High
School of Edinburgh : while, by the then
living and universal influence of Sir Walter,
every scene of his native city was exalted in
his imagination by the purest poetry, and
the proudest history, that ever hallowed or
haunted the streets and rocks of a brightly
inhabited capital. I have neither space, nor
wish, to extend my proposed account of things
that have been, by records of correspond-
ence ; — it is too much the habit of modern
biographers to confuse epistolary talk with
vital fact. But the following letter from Dr.
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. I 79
Thomas Brown to my father, at this critical
juncture of his life, must be read, in part as
a testimony to the position he already held
among the youths of Edinburgh, and yet more
as explaining some points of his blended char-
acter, of the deepest significance afterwards,
both to himself and to me.
144- "8, N. St. David's Street,
"Edinburgh, February i8//z, 1807.
" My dear Sir, — When I look at the date
of the letter which you did me the honour to
send me as your adviser in literary matters
— an office which a proficient like you scarcely
requires — I am quite ashamed of the interval
which I have suffered to elapse. I can truly
assure you, however, that it has been un-
avoidable, and has not arisen from any want
of interest in your intellectual progress. Even
when you were a mere boy I was much de-
lighted with your early zeal and attainments ;
and for }'our own sake, as well as for your
excellent mother's, I have always looked to
you with great regard, and with the belief
that you would distinguish yourself in what-
ever profession you might adopt.
l80 PR.ETERITA.
" You seem, I think, to repent too much the
time you have devoted to the Belles Lettres.
I confess I do not regret this for you. You
must, I am sure, have felt the effect which
such studies have in giving a general refine-
ment to the manners and to the heart, which,
to anyone who is not to be strictly a man of
science, is the most valuable effect of literature.
You must remember that there is a great dif-
ference between studying professionally, and
studying for relaxation and ornament. In
the society in which you are to mix, the
writers in Belles Lettres will be mentioned
fifty times, when more abstract science will
not be mentioned once ; and there is this
great advantage in that sort of knowledge,
that the display of it, unless very immoderate
indeed, is not counted pedantry, when the
display of other intellectual attainments might
run some risk of the imputation. There is
indeed one evil in the reading of poetry and
other light productions, that it is apt to be
indulged in to downright gluttony, and to
occupy time which should be given to busi-
ness ; but I am sure I can rely on you that
you will not so misapply your time. There
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. I 8 I
is, however, one science, the first and greatest
of sciences to all men, and to merchants
particularly — the science of Political Economy.
To this I think your chief attention should
be directed. It is in truth the science of
your own profession, which counteracts the
— (word lost with seal) — and narrow habits
which that profession is sometimes apt to pro-
duce ; and which is of perpetual appeal in
every discussion on mercantile and financial
affairs. A merchant well instructed in Politi-
cal Economy must always be fit to lead the
views of his brother merchants — without it,
he is a mere trader. Do not lose a day,
therefore, without providing yourself with a
copy of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations,'
and read and re-read it with attention — as I
am sure you must read it with delight. In
giving you this advice I consider you as a
merchant, for as that is to be your profession
in life, your test of the importance of any
acquirement should be how far it will tend
to render you an honourable and distinguished
merchant ; — a character of no small estima-
tion in this commercial country. I therefore
consider the physical sciences as greatly
I 82 PR/ETERITA.
subordinate in relation to your prospects in
life, and the society in which you will be called
to mingle. All but chemistry require a greater
preparation in mathematics than you probably
have, and chemistry it is quite impossible to
understand without some opportunity of see-
ing experiments systematical^ carried on.
If, however, you have the opportunity to
attend any of the lecturers on that science
in London, it will be well worth your while,
and in that case I think you should purchase
either Dr. Thompson's or Mr. Murray's new
system of chemistr}', so as to keep up con-
stantly with your lecturer. Even of physics
in general it is pleasant to have some view,
however superficial, and therefore though you
cannot expect without mathematics to have
anything but a superficial view, you had
better try to attain it. With this view you
may read Gregory's ' Economy of Nature,'
which though not a good book, and not
always accurate, is, I believe, the best popu-
lar book we have, and sufficiently accurate
for your purposes. Remember, however,
that though you may be permitted to be
a superficial natural philosopher, no such
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. I 83
indulgence is to be given you in Political
Economy.
" The only other circumstance remaining
for me to request of you is that you will not
suffer yourself to lose any of the languages
you have acquired. Of the modern languages
there is less fear, as your mercantile com-
munications will in some measure keep them
alive ; but merchants do not correspond in
Latin, and you may perhaps lose it uncon-
sciously. Independently, however, of the
admirable writers of whom you would thus
deprive yourself, and considering the language
merely as the accomplishment of a gentleman,
it is of too great value to be carelessly re-
signed.
" Farewell, my dear sir. Accept the regard
of all this family, and believe me, with every
wish to be of service to you,
Your sincere friend,
" T. Brown."
145. It may easily be conceived that a
youth to whom such a letter as this was
addressed by one of the chiefs of the purely
intelli etual circles of Edinburgh, would be
I84 PR^TERITA.
regarded with more respect by his Croydon
cousin than is usually rendered by grown
young women to their schoolboy friends.
Their frank, cousinly relation went on,
however, without a thought on either side of
any closer ties, until my father, at two or
three and twenty, after various apprentice-
ship in London, was going finally to London
to begin his career in his own business. By
that time he had made up his mind that
Margaret, though not the least an ideal
heroine to him, was quite the best sort of
person he could have for a wife, the rather as
they were already so well used to each other;
and in a quiet, but enough resolute way,
asked her if she were of the same mind, and
would wait until he had an independence
to offer her. His early tutress consented
with frankly confessed joy, not indeed in the
Agnes Wickfield way, ' I have loved you all
my life,' but feeling and admitting that it was
great delight to be allowed to love him now.
The relations between Grace Nugent and Lord
Colambre in Miss Edgeworth's ' Absentee '
extremely resemble those between my father
and mother, except that Lord Colambre is a
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. I 8 5
more eager lover. My father chose his wife
much with the same kind of serenity and
decision with which afterwards he chose his
clerks.
146. A time of active and hopeful content-
ment for both the young people followed, my
mother being perhaps the more deeply in love,
while John depended more absolutely on her
sympathy and wise friendship than is at all
usual with young men of the present day in
their relations with admired young ladies.
But neither of them ever permitted their feel-
ings to degenerate into fretful or impatient
passion. My mother showed her affection
chiefly in steady endeavour to cultivate her
powers of mind, and form her manners, so
as to fit herself to be the undespised com-
panion of a man whom she considered much
her superior : my father in unremitting atten-
tion to the business on the success of which
his marriage depended : and in a methodical
regularity of conduct and correspondence
which never left his mistress a moment of
avoidable anxiety, or gave her motive for any
serious displeasure.
On these terms the engagement lasted nine
I 86 PRvETERITA.
years ; at the end of which time, my grand-
father's debts having been all paid, and my
father established in a business gradually
increasing, and liable to no grave contingency,
the now not very young people were married
in Perth one evening after supper, the servants
of the house having no suspicion of the event
until John and Margaret drove away together
next morning to Edinburgh.
147. In looking back to my past thoughts
and ways, nothing astonishes me more than
my want of curiosity about all these matters ;
and that, often and often as my mother used
to tell with complacency the story of this
carefully secret marriage, I never asked, ' But,
mother, why so secret, when it was just what
all the friends of both of you so long expected,
and what all your best friends so heartily
wished ? J
But, until lately, I never thought of writing
any more about myself than was set down
in diaries, nor of my family at all : and thus
too carelessly, and, as I now think, profanely,
neglected the traditions of my people. ' What
does it all matter, now ? ' I said ; ' we are what
we are, and shall be what we make ourselves.'
VII. PArA AND MAMMA. I 87
Also, until very lately, I had accustomed
myself to consider all that my parents had
done, so far as their own happiness was con-
cerned, entirely wise and exemplary. Yet
the reader must not suppose that what I have
said in my deliberate writings on the propriety
of long engagements had any reference to this
singular one in my own family. Of the
heroism and patience with which the sacrifice
was made, on both sides, I cannot judge : —
but that it was greater than I should myself
have been capable of, I know, and I believe
that it was unwise. For during these years
of waiting, my father fell gradually into a
state of ill-health, from which he never entirely
recovered ; and in close of life, they both had
to leave their child, just when he was begin-
ning to satisfy the hopes they had formed for
him.
148. I have allowed this tale of the little I
knew of their early trials and virtues to be
thus chance told, because I think my history
will, in the end, be completest if I write as its
connected subjects occur to me, and not with
formal chronology of plan. My reason for
telling it in this place was chiefly to explain
I 8 8 PR^ETERITA.
how my mother obtained her perfect skill
in English reading, through the hard effort
which, through the years of waiting, she made
to efface the faults, and supply the defects, of
her early education ; effort which was aided
and directed unerringly by her natural — for
its intensity I might justly call it supernatural
— purity of heart and conduct, leading her
always to take most delight in the right and
clear language which only can relate lovely
things. Her unquestioning evangelical faith
in the literal truth of the Bible placed me, as
soon as I could conceive or think, in the
presence of an unseen world ; and set my
active analytic power early to work on the
questions of conscience, free will, and re-
sponsibility, which are easily determined in
days of innocence ; but are approached too
often with prejudice, and always with disad-
vantage, after men become stupified by the
opinions, or tainted by the sins, of the outer
world : while the gloom, and even terror,
with which the restrictions of the Sunday,
and the doctrines of the Pilgrim's Progress,
the Holy War, and Quarks' Emblems, op-
pressed the seventh part of my time, was
^
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. I 89
useful to me as the only form of vexation
which I was called on to endure ; and re-
deemed by the otherwise uninterrupted cheer-
fulness and tranquillity of a household wherein
the common ways were all of pleasantness,
and its single and strait path, of perfect
peace.
149. My father's failure of health, following
necessarily on the long years of responsibility
and exertion, needed only this repose to effect
its cure. Shy to an extreme degree in general
company, all the more because he had natural
powers which he was unable to his own satis-
faction to express, — his business faculty was
entirely superb and easy : he gave his full
energy to counting-house work in the morn-
ing, and his afternoons to domestic rest.
With instant perception and decision in all
business questions ; with principles of dealing
which admitted of no infraction, and involved
neither anxiety nor concealment, the counting-
house work was more of an interest, or even
an amusement, to him, than a care. His
capital was either in the Bank, or in St.
Catherine's Docks, in the form of insured
butts of the finest sherry in the world ; his
1 90 PR^.TERITA.
partner, Mr. Domecq, a Spaniard as proud as
himself, as honourable, and having perfect
trust in him, — not only in his probity, but
his judgment, — accurately complying with all
his directions in the preparation of wine for
the English market, and no less anxious than
he to make every variety of it, in its several
rank, incomparably good. The letters to
Spain therefore needed only brief statement
that the public of that year wanted their wine
young or old, pale or brown, and the like ;
and the letters to customers were as brief in
their assurances that if they found fault with
their wine, they did not understand it, and if
they wanted an extension of credit, they could
not have it. These Spartan brevities of
epistle were, however, always supported by
the utmost care in executing his correspon-
dents' orders ; and by the unusual attention
shown them in travelling for those orders
himself, instead of sending an agent or a
clerk. His domiciliary visits of this kind
were always conducted by him with great
savoir /aire and pleasant courtes}', no less
than the most attentive patience : and they
were productive of the more confidence
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. 1 9 1
between him and the country merchant, that he
was perfectly just and candid in appraise-
ment of the wine of rival houses, while his
fine palate enabled him always to sustain
triumphantly any and every ordeal of blind-
fold question which the suspicious customer
might put him to. Also, when correspondents
of importance came up to town, my father
would put himself so far out of his way as to
ask them to dine at Heme Hill, and try the
contents of his own cellar. These London
visits fell into groups, on any occasions in
the metropolis of interest more than usual to
the provincial mind. Our business dinners
were then arranged so as to collect two or
three country visitors together, and the table
made symmetrical by selections from the
house's customers in London, whose con-
versation might be most instructive to its rural
friends.
Very early in my boy's life I began much
to dislike these commercial feasts, and to
form, by carefully attending to their dialogue,
when it chanced to turn on any other subject
than wine, an extremely low estimate of the
commercial mind as such ; — estimate which
I92 PRJETERITA.
I have never had the slightest reason to
alter.
Of our neighbours on Heme Hill we saw
nothing, with one exception only, afterwards
to be noticed. They were for the most part
well-to-do London tradesmen of the better
class, who had little sympathy with my
mother's old-fashioned ways, and none with
my father's romantic sentiment.
150. There was probably the farther reason
for our declining the intimacy of our imme-
diate neighbours, that most of them were far
more wealthy than we, and inclined to demon-
strate their wealth by the magnificence of
their establishments. My parents lived with
strict economy, kept only female servants,*
used only tallow candles in plated candle-
sticks, were content with the leasehold terri-
tory of their front and back gardens, — scarce
an acre altogether, — and kept neither horse
nor carriage. Our shop-keeping neighbours,
on the contrary, had usually great cortege
of footmen and glitter of plate, extensive
* Thomas left us, I think partly in shame for my per.
manently injured lip ; and we never had another indoor
manservant.
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. 193
pleasure grounds, costly hot-houses, and
carriages driven by coachmen in wigs. It
may be perhaps doubted by some of my
readers whether the coldness of acquaint-
anceship was altogether on our side; but
assuredly my father was too proud to join
entertainments for which he could give no
like return, and my mother did not care to
leave her card on foot at the doors of ladies
who dashed up to hers in their barouche.
151. Protected by these monastic severities
and aristocratic dignities, from the snares and
disturbances of the outer world, the routine
of my childish days became fixed, as of the
sunrise and sunset to a nestling. It may
seem singular to many of my readers that I
remember with most pleasure the time when
it was most regular and most solitary. The
entrance of my cousin Mary into our house-
hold was coincident with the introduction of
masters above described, and with other
changes in the aims and employments of the
day, which, while they often increased its
interest, disturbed its tranquillity. The ideas
of success at school or college, put before me
by my masters, were ignoble and comfortless,
vol. 1. N
194 PR^TERITA.
in comparison with my mother's regretful
blame, or simple praise : and Mary, though of
a mildly cheerful and entirely amiable disposi-
tion, necessarily touched the household heart
with the sadness of her orphanage, and some-
thing interrupted its harmony by the differ-
ence, which my mother could not help
showing, between the feelings with which she
regarded her niece and her child
152. And although I have dwelt with
thankfulness on the many joys and advantages
of these secluded years, the vigilant reader
will not, I hope, have interpreted the accounts
rendered of them into general praise of a like
home education in the environs of London.
But one farther good there was in it, hitherto
unspoken ; that great part of my acute per-
ception and deep feeling of the beauty of
architecture and scenery abroad, was owing
to the well-formed habit of narrowing myself
to happiness within the four brick walls of
our fifty by one hundred yards of garden ;
and accepting with resignation the aesthetic
external surroundings of a London suburb,
and, }'et more, of a London chapel. For
Dr. Andrews' was the Londonian chapel in
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. I 95
its perfect type, definable as accurately as a
Roman basilica, — an oblong, flat-ceiled barn,
lighted by windows with semi-circular heads,
brick-arched, filled by small-paned glass held
by iron bars, like fine threaded halves of cob-
webs ; galleries propped on iron pipes, up
both sides ; pews, well shut in, each of them,
by partitions of plain deal, and neatly brass-
latched deal doors, filling the barn floor, all
but its two lateral straw-matted passages ;
pulpit, sublimely isolated, central from sides
and clear of altar rails at end ; a stout, four-
legged box of well-grained wainscot, high as
the level of front galleries, and decorated with
a cushion of crimson velvet, padded six inches
thick, with gold tassels at the corners; which
was a great resource to me when I was tired
of the sermon, because I liked watching the
rich colour of the folds and creases that came
in it when the clergyman thumped it.
153. Imagine the change between one
Sunday and the next, — from the morning
service in this building, attended by the
families of the small shopkeepers of the Wal-
worth Road, in their Sunday trimmings ; (our
plumber's wife, fat, good, sensible Mrs. Goad,
1 96 PR^TERITA.
sat in the next pew in front of us, sternly
sensitive to the interruption of her devotion
by our late arrivals) ; fancy the change from
this, to high mass in Rouen Cathedral, its
nave filled by the white-capped peasantry of
half Normandy !
Nor was the contrast less enchanting or
marvellous between the street architecture
familiar to my eyes, and that of Flanders
and Italy, as an exposition of mercantile taste
and power. My father's counting-house was
in the centre of Billiter Street, some years
since effaced from sight and memory of men,
but a type, then, of English city state in per-
fection. We now build house fronts as ad-
vertisements, spending a hundred thousand
pounds in the lying mask of our bankruptcies.
But in my father's time both trade and build-
ing were still honest. His counting-house
was a room about fifteen feet by twenty,
including desks for two clerks, and a small
cupboard for sherry samples, on the first
floor, with a larger room opposite for private
polite receptions of elegant visitors, or the
serving of a chop for himself if he had to
stay late in town. The ground floor was
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. 1 97
occupied by friendly Messrs. Wardell and
Co., a bottling retail firm, I believe. The
only advertisement of the place of business
was the brass plate under the bell-handle,
inscribed ' Ruskin, Telford, and Domecq,'
brightly scrubbed by the single female ser-
vant in charge of the establishment, old
Maisie, — abbreviated or tenderly diminished
into the 'sie,' from I know not what Chris-
tian name — Marion, I believe, as Mary into
Mause. The whole house, three-storied, with
garrets, was under her authority, with, doubt-
less, assistant morning charwoman, — cooking,
waiting, and answering the door to distin-
guished visitors, all done by Maisie, the
visitors being expected of course to announce
themselves by the knocker with a flourish in
proportion to their eminence in society. The
business men rang the counting-house bell
aforesaid, (round which the many coats of
annual paint were cut into a beautiful slant
section by daily scrubbing, like the coats of an
agate ;) and were admitted by lifting of latch,
manipulated by the head clerk's hand in the
counting-house, without stirring from his seat.
154. This unpretending establishment, as
I98 TR^TERITA.
I said, formed part of the western side of
Billiter Street, a narrow trench — it may have
been thirty feet wide — admitting, with careful
and precise driving, the passing each other
of two brewers' drays. I am not sure that
this was possible at the ends of the street,
but only at a slight enlargement opposite the
brewery in the middle. Effectively a mere
trench between three-storied houses of pro-
digious brickwork, thoroughly well laid, and
presenting no farther entertainment whatever
to the aesthetic beholder than the alternation
of the ends and sides of their beautifully level
close courses of bricks, and the practised and
skilful radiation of those which formed the
window lintels.
Typical, I repeat, of the group of London
edifices, east of the Mansion House, and
extending to the Tower ; the under-hill pic-
turesquenesses of which, however, were in
early days an entirely forbidden district to
me, lest I should tumble into the docks ; but
Fenchurch and Leadenhall Streets, familiar
to me as the perfection of British mercantile
state and grandeur, — the reader may by effort,
though still dimly, conceive the effect on my
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. 1 99
imagination of the fantastic gables of Ghent,
and orange-scented cortiles of Genoa. -
155. I can scarcely account to myself, on
any of the ordinary principles of resignation,
for the undimmed tranquillity of pleasure with
which, after these infinite excitements in
foreign lands, my father would return to his
desk opposite the brick wall of the brewery,
and I to my niche behind the drawing-room
chimney piece. But to both of us, the steady
occupations, the beloved samenesses, and the
sacred customs of home were more precious
than all the fervours of wonder in things new
to us, or delight in scenes of incomparable
beauty. Very early, indeed, I had found that
novelty was soon exhausted, and beauty,
though inexhaustible, beyond a certain point
or time of enthusiasm, no more to be enjoyed ;
but it is not so often observed by philosophers
that home, healthily organized, is always en-
joyable ; nay, the sick thrill of pleasure
through all the brain and heart with which,
after even so much as a month or two of
absence, I used to catch the first sight of the
ridge of Heme Hill, and watch for every turn
of the well-known road and every branch of
200 PR^ETERITA.
the familiar trees, was — though not so deep
or overwhelming — more intimately and vitally
powerful than the brightest passions of joy in
strange lands, or even in the unaccustomed
scenery of my own. To my mother, her
ordinary household cares, her reading with
Mary and me, her chance of a chat with Mrs.
Gray, and the unperturbed preparation for my
father's return, and for the quiet evening, were
more than all the splendours or wonders of
the globe between poles and equator.
1 56. Thus we returned — full of new thoughts,
and faithful to the old, to this exulting rest
of home in the close of 1833. An unforeseen
shadow was in the heaven of its charmed
horizon.
Every day at Cornhill, Charles became
more delightful and satisfactory to everybody
who knew him. How a boy living all day in
London could keep so bright a complexion,
and so crisply Achillean curls of hair — and
all the gay spirit of his Croydon mother — was
not easily conceivable ; but he became a per-
fect combination of the sparkle of Jin Vin
with the steadiness of Tunstall, and was un-
troubled by the charms of any unattainable
VII. PAPA AND MAMMA. 201
Margaret, for his master had no daughter;
but, as worse chance would have it, a son : so
that looking forward to possibilities as a rising
apprentice ought, Charles saw that there were
none in the house for him beyond the place
of cashier, or perhaps only head-clerk. His
elder brother, who had taught him to swim
by throwing him into Croydon canal, was
getting on fast as a general trader in'Australia,
and naturally longed to have his best-loved
brother there for a partner. Bref, it was
resolved that Charles should go to Australia.
The Christmas time of 1833 passed heavily,
for I was very sorry; Mary, a good deal
more so : and my father and mother, though
in their hearts caring for nobody in the world
but me, were grave at the thought of Charles's
going so far away; but, honestly and justifi-
ably, thought it for the lad's good. I think
the whole affair was decided, and Charles's
outfit furnished, and ship's berth settled, and
ship's captain interested in his favour, in
something less than a fortnight, and down
he went to Portsmouth to join his ship joy-
fully, with the world to win. By due post
came the news that he was at anchor off
202 PR^LTERITA.
Cowes, but that the ship could not sail
because of the west wind. And post suc-
ceeded post, and still the west wind blew.
We liked the west wind for its own
sake, but it was a prolonging of farewell
which teazed us, though Charles wrote that
he was enjoying himself immensely, and the
captain, that he had made friends with every
sailor on board, besides the passengers.
157. And still the west wind blew. I do
not remember how long — some ten days or
fortnight, I believe. At last, one day my
mother and Mary went with my father into
town on some shopping or sight-seeing busi-
ness of a cheerful character ; and I was left
at home, busy also about something that
cheered me greatly, I know not what ; but
when I heard the others come in, and upstairs
into the drawing-room, I ran eagerly down
and into the room, beginning to tell them
about this felicity that had befallen me, what-
ever it was. They all stood like statues, my
father and mother very grave. Mary was
looking out of the window — the farthest of
the front three from the door. As I went
on, boasting of myself, she turned round
VIF. PAPA AND MAMMA. 20j
suddenly, her face all streaming with tears,
and caught hold of me, and put her face
close to mine, that I might hear the sobbing
whisper, ' Charles is gone.'
158. The west wind had still blown, clearly
and strong, and the day before there had
been a fresh breeze of it round the isle, at
Spithead, exactly the kind of breeze that
drifts the clouds, and ridges the waves, in
Turner's Gosport.
The ship was sending her boat on shore
for some water, or the like — her little cutter,
or somehow sailing, boat. There was a heavy
sea running, and the sailors, and, I believe.
also a passenger or two, had some difficulty
in getting on board. ' May I go, too ? ' .said
Charles to the captain, as he stood seetng
them down the side. ' Are yoiv not afraid ? '
said the captain. ' I never .was afraid of
anything in my life,' said Charles, and went
down the side and leaped in.
F) 3£Wfts ~
The boat had not got fifty yards from the
ship before she went over, but there were
other boats sailing all about them, like gnats
in midsummer Two or three scudded to
the spot' in' a minute, and every soul was
204 PR^ETERITA.
saved, except Charles, who went down like a
stone.
22nd January, 1834.
All this we knew by little and little. For
the first day or two we would not believe it,
but thought he must have been taken up by
some other boat and carried to sea. At last
came word that his body had been thrown
ashore at Cowes : and his father went down
to see him buried. That done, and all the
story heard, for still the ship stayed, he came
to Heme Hill, to tell Charles's 'auntie' all
about it. (The old man never called my
mother anything else than auntie.) It was
in J the morning, in the front parlour — my
bit? ' -
own
in
non
DAK2,
mother knitting in her usual place at the fire
sTaeyl at my drawing, or the like, in my
place aiso/' My- uncle told all the story,
the quie^ sfeady sort, of way that the
English doj uli just at the end he broke down
into sobbing, saying \I can hear the words
now), 'They caught ttfc cap off of his head,
and yet they couldn t save him.
Iha g'i fnw t
-Tth<fe M t
I
CHAPTER VIII.
VESTER, CAMENAE.
159. THE death of Charles closed the doors
of my heart again for that time ; and the self-
engrossed quiet of the Heme Hill life con-
tinued for another year, leaving little to be
remembered, and less to be told. My parents
made one effort, however, to obtain some
healthy companionship for me, to which I
probably owe more than I knew at the
moment.
Some six or seven gates down the hill
towards the field, (which I have to return
most true thanks to its present owner, Mr.
Sopper, for having again opened to the public
sight in consequence of the passage above
describing the greatness of its loss both to
the neighbour and the stranger), some six or
seven gates down that way, a pretty lawn,
shaded by a low spreading cedar, opened
before an extremely neat and carefully kept
205
206 PR^ETERITA.
house, where lived two people, modest in
their ways as my father and mother them-
selves, — Mr. and Mrs. Fall ; happier, how-
ever, in having son and daughter instead of
an only child. Their son, Richard, was a
year younger than I, but already at school
at Shrewsbury, and somewhat in advance of
me therefore in regular discipline ; extremely
gentle and good-natured, — his sister, still
younger, a clever little girl, her mother's
constant companion : and both of them un-
pretending, but rigid, examples of all Heme
Hill proprieties, true religions, and useful
learnings. I shudder still at the recollec-
tion of Mrs. Fall's raised eyebrows one
day at my pronunciation of ' naivete ' as
' naivette.'
1 60. I think it must have been as early
as 1832 that my father, noticing with great
respect the conduct of all matters in this
family, wrote to Mr. Fall in courteous request
that ' the two boys ' might be permitted, when
Richard was at home, to pursue their holiday
tasks, or recreations, so far as it pleased them,
together. The proposal was kindly taken :
the two boys took stock of each other, —
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 207
agreed to the arrangement, — and, as I had
been promoted by that time to the possession
of a study, all to myself, while Richard had
only his own room, (and that liable to sisterly
advice or intrusion,) the course which things
fell into was that usually, when Richard was
at home, he came up past the seven gates
about ten in the morning; did what lessons
he had to do at the same table with me, occa-
sionally helping me a little with mine ; and
then we went together for afternoon walk with
Dash, Gipsy, or whatever dog chanced to be
dominant.
161. I do not venture to affirm that the
snow of those Christmas holidays was whiter
than it is now, though I might give some
reasons for supposing that it remained longer
white. But I affirm decisively that it used
to fall deeper in the neighbourhood of London
than has been seen for the last twenty or
twenty-five years. It was quite usual to find
in the hollows of the Norwood Hills the field
fences buried under crested waves of snow,
while, from the higher ridges, half the counties
of Kent and Surrey shone to the horizon like
a cloudless and terrorless Arctic sea.
208 PRjETERITA.
Richard Fall was entirely good-humoured,
sensible, and practical; but had no particular
tastes; a distaste, if anything, for my styles
both of art and poetry. He stiffly declined
arbitration on the merits of my compositions ;
and though with pleasant cordiality in daily
companionship, took rather the position of
putting up with me, than of pride in his
privilege of acquaintance with a rising author.
He was never unkind or sarcastic ; but
laughed me inexorably out of writing bad
English for rhyme's sake, or demonstrable
nonsense either in prose or rhyme. We got
gradually accustomed to be together, and far
on into life were glad when any chance
brought us together again.
162. The year 1834 passed innocuously
enough, but with little profit, in the quadri-
partite industries before described, followed
for my own pleasure ; — with minglings of
sapless effort in the classics, in which I
neither felt, nor foresaw, the least good.
Innocuously enough, I say,— meaning, with
as little mischief as a well-intentioned boy,
virtually masterless, could suffer from having
all his own way, and daily confirming himself
VIII. VKSTER, CAMENAE. 2O9
in the serious impression that his own way
was always the best.
I cannot analyse, at least without taking
more trouble than I suppose any reader would
care to take with me, the mixed good and evil
in the third rate literature which I preferred
to the Latin classics. My volume of the
Forget-me-not, which gave me that precious
engraving of Verona, (curiously also another
by Prout of St. Mark's at Venice), was some-
what above the general caste of annuals in
its quality of letterpress ; and contained three
stories, 'The Red-nosed Lieutenant/ by the
Rev. George Croly ; ' Mans in Kelder,' by the
author of ' Chronicles of London Bridge ; ' and
'The Comet,' by Henry Neele, Esq., which
were in their several ways extremely impres-
sive to me. The partly childish, partly dull,
or even, as aforesaid, idiotic, way I had of
staring at the same things all day long,
carried itself out in reading, so that I could
read the same things all the year round. As
there was neither advantage nor credit to be
got by remembering fictitious circumstances,
I was, if anything, rather proud of my skill
in forgetting, so as the sooner to recover
vol. 1. o
2 I O PR.STERITA.
the zest of the tales ; and I suppose these
favourites, and a good many less important
ones of the sort, were read some twenty
times a year, during the earlier epoch of
teens.
163. I wonder a little at my having been
allowed so long to sit in that drawing-room
corner with only my Rogers' Italy, my
Forget-me-not, the Continental Annual, and
Friendships' Offering, for my working library ;
and I wonder a little more that my father, in
his passionate hope that I might one day
write like Byron, never noticed that Byron's
early power was founded on a course of
general reading of the masters in every walk
of literature, such as is, I think, utterly un-
paralleled in any other young life, whether
of student or author. But I was entirely
incapable of such brain-work, and the real
gift I had in drawing involved the use in its
practice of the best energy of the day. Hans
in Kelder, and The Comet, were my manner
of rest.
I do not know when my father first began
to read Byron to me, with any expectation of
my liking him ; all primary training, after the
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 2 11
Iliad, having been in Scott ; but it must have
been about the beginning of the teen period,
else I should recollect the first effect of it.
Manfred evidently, I had got at, like Macbeth,
for the sake of the witches. Various ques-
tionable changes were made, however, at that
1 83 1 turning of twelve, in the Hermitage
discipline of Heme Hill. I was allowed to
taste wine; taken to the theatre; and, on
festive days, even dined with my father and
mother at four : and it was then generally at
dessert that my father would read any other-
wise suspected delight : the Noctes Ambro-
sianae regularly when they came out — without
the least missing of the naughty words ; and
at last, the shipwreck in Don Juan, — of which,
finding me rightly appreciative, my father
went on with nearly all the rest. I recollect
that he and my mother looked across the table
at each other with something of alarm, when,
on asking me a few festas afterwards what
we should have for after dinner reading, I
instantly answered 'Juan and Haidee.' My
selection was not adopted, and, feeling there
was something wrong somewhere, I did not
press it, attempting even some stutter of
J
2 I 2 PR^TERITA.
apology which made matters worse. Perhaps
I was given a bit of Childe Harold instead,
which I liked at that time nearly as well ; and,
indeed, the story of Haidee soon became too
sad for me. But very certainly, by the end
of this year 1834, I knew my Byron pretty
well all through, all but Cain, Werner, the
Deformed Transformed, and Vision of Judg-
ment, none of which I could understand, nor
did papa and mamma think it would be well
I should try to.
164. The ingenuous reader may perhaps be
so much surprised that mamma fell in with
all this, that it becomes here needful to mark
for him some peculiarities in my mother's
prudery which he could not discover for him-
self, from anything hitherto told of her. He
might indeed guess that, after taking me at
least six times straight through the Bible,
she was not afraid of plain words to, or for,
me ; 'but might not feel that in the energy and
affectionateness of her character, she had as
much sympathy with all that is noble and
beautiful in Byron as my father himself; nor
that her Puritanism was clear enough in
common sense to see that, while Shakespeare
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 2 I 3
and Burns lay open on the table all day, there
was no reason for much mystery with Byron
(though until later I was not allowed to read
him for myself). She had trust in my dis- /
position and education, and was no more
afraid of my turning out a Corsair or a Giaour
than a Richard III., or a Solomon. And
she was perfectly right, so far. I never got
the slightest harm from Byron : what harm
came to me was from the facts of life, and
from books of a baser kind, including a wide
range of the works of authors popularly con-
sidered extremely instructive — from Victor
Hugo down to Doctor Watts. ,
165. Farther, I will take leave to explain in
this place what I meant by saying that my
mother was an ' inoffensive ' prude. She was
herself as strict as Alice Bridgenorth ; but
she understood the doctrine of the religion
she had learnt, and, without ostentatiously
calling herself a miserable sinner, knew that
according to that doctrine, and probably in
fact, Madge Wildfire was no worse a sinner
than she. She was like her sister in universal
charity — had sympathy with every passion,
as well as every virtue, of true womanhood;
2 I 4 PR^ETERITA.
and, in her heart of hearts, perhaps liked the
real Margherita Cogni quite as well as the
ideal wife of Faliero.
1 66. And there was one more feature in my
mother's character which must be here asserted
at once, to put an end to the notion of which
I see traces in some newspaper comments on
my past descriptions of her, that she was in
any wise like Esther's religious aunt in Bleak
House. Far on the contrary, there was a
hearty, frank, and sometimes even irrepres-
sible, laugh in my mother ! Never sardonic,
yet with a very definitely Smollettesque turn
in it ! so that, between themselves, she and
my father enjoyed their Humphrey Clinker
extremely, long before / was able to under-
stand either the jest or gist of it. Much more,
she could exult in a harmless bit of Smol-
lettesque reality. Years and years after this
time, in one of our crossings of the Simplon,
just at the top, where we had stopped to look
about us, Nurse Anne sat down to rest her-
self on the railings at the roadside, just in
front of the monastery ; — the off roadside, from
which the bank slopes steeply down outside
the fence. Turning to observe the panoramic
VIII. VESTEK, CAMENAE. 2 I 5
picturesque, Anne lost her balance, and went
backwards over the railings down the bank.
My father could not help suggesting that she
had done it expressly for the entertainment of
the Holy Fathers ; and neither he nor my
mother could ever speak of the ' performance '
(as they called it) afterwards, without laughing
for a quarter of an hour.
167. If, however, there was the least bitter-
ness or irony in a jest, my mother did not like
it ; but my father and I liked it all the more,
if it were just ; and, so far as I could under-
stand it, I rejoiced in all the sarcasm of Don
Juan. But my firm decision, as soon as I got
well into the later cantos of it, that Byron
was to be my master in verse, as Turner in
colour, was made of course in that gosling
(or say cygnet) epoch of existence, without
consciousness of the deeper instincts that
prompted it : only two things I consciously
recognized, that his truth of observation was
the most exact, and his chosen expression the
most concentrated, that I had yet found in
literature. By that time my father had him-
self put me through the two first books of
Livy, and I knew, therefore, what close-set
2l6 PRiETERITA.
language was ; but I saw then that Livy, as
afterwards that Horace and Tacitus, were
studiously, often laboriously, and sometimes
obscurely, concentrated : while Byron wrote,
as easily as a hawk flies, and as clearly as a
lake reflects, the exact truth in the precisely
narrowest terms ; nor only the exact truth,
but the most central and useful one.
1 68. Of course I could no more measure
Byron's greater powers at that time than I
could Turner's ; but I saw that both were
right in all things that / knew right from
wrong in ; and that they must thenceforth be
my masters, each in his own domain. The
modern reader, not to say also, modern
scholar, is usually so ignorant of the essential
qualities of Byron, that I cannot go farther in
the story of my own novitiate under him with-
out illustrating, by rapid example, the things
which I saw to be unrivalled in his work.
For this purpose I take his common prose,
rather than his verse, since his modes of
rhythm involve other questions than those
with which I am now concerned. Read, for
chance-first, the sentence on Sheridan, in his
letter to Thomas Moore, from Venice, June
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 2 I J
1st (or dawn of June 2nd!), 1818. 'The
Whigs abuse him ; however, he never left
them, and such blunderers deserve neither
credit nor compassion. As for his creditors
— remember Sheridan never had a shilling,
and was thrown, with great powers and pas-
sions, into the thick of the world, and placed
upon the pinnacle of success, with no other
external means to support him in his ele-
vation. Did Fox pay his debts ? or did
Sheridan take a subscription ? Was 's
drunkenness more excusable than his ? Were
his intrigues more notorious than those of all
his contemporaries ? and is his memory to be
blasted and theirs respected ? Don't let your-
self be led away by clamour, but compare him
with the coalitioner Fox, and the pensioner
Burke, as a man of principle; and with ten
hundred thousand in personal views ; and
with none in talent, for he beat them all out
and out. Without means, without connection,
without character (which might be false at
first, and drive him mad afterwards from
desperation), he beat them all, in all he ever
attempted. But, alas poor human nature !
Good-night, or rather morning. It is four,
2 I 8 PRjETERITA.
and the dawn gleams over the Grand Canal,
and unshadows the Rialto.'
i/ 169. Now, observe, that passage is noble,
primarily because it contains the utmost
number that will come together into the
space, of absolutely just, wise, and kind
thoughts. But it is more than noble, it is
perfect, because the quantity it holds is not
artificially or intricately concentrated, but with
the serene swiftness of a smith's hammer-
strokes on hot iron ; and with choice of terms
which, each in its place, will convey far more
than they mean in the dictionary. Thus,
'however' is used instead of 'yet,' because it
stands for ' howsoever,' or, in full, for ' yet
whatever they did.' 'Thick' of society, be-
cause it means, not merely the crowd, but the
fog of it ; ' ten hundred thousand ' instead of
'a million,' or 'a thousand thousand,' to take
the sublimity out of the number, and make us
feel that it is a number of nobodies. Then
the sentence in parenthesis, ' which might be
false,' etc., is indeed obscure, because it was
impossible to clarify it without a regular pause,
and much loss of time ; and the reader's sense
is therefore left to expand it for himself into
I
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 2 19
'it was, perhaps, falsely said of him at first,
that he had no character,' etc. Finally, the
dawn 'unshadows' — lessens the shadow on —
the Rialto, but does not gleam on that, as on
the broad water.
170. Next, take the two sentences on
poetry, in his letters to Murray of September
15 th, 1817, and April 12th, 181 8; (for the
collected force of these compare the deliberate
published statement in the answer to Black-
wood in 1820.)
1 8 17. 'With regard to poetry in general, I
am convinced, the more I think of it, that
he (Moore), and all of us — Scott, Southey,
Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, I, — are all in
the wrong, one as much as another; that
we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical
system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself,
and from which none but Rogers and Crabbe
are free : and that the present and next genera-
tions will finally be of this opinion. I am
the more confirmed in this by having lately
gone over some of our classics, particularly
Pope, whom I tried in this way: 1 took
Moore's poems, and my own, and some others,
and went over them side by side with Pope's,
2 20 PR/ETERITA.
and I was really astonished (I ought not to
have been so) and mortified, at the ineffable
distance in point of sense, learning, effect, and
even imagination, passion, and invention, be-
tween the little Queen Anne's man, and us
of the Lower Empire. Depend upon it, it is
all Horace then, and Claudian now, among
us ; and if I had to begin again, I would
mould myself accordingly. Crabbe's the
man ; but he has got a coarse and imprac-
ticable subject, and ... is retired upon half-
pay, and has done enough, unless he were to
do as he did formerly.'
1818. 'I thought of a preface, defending
Lord Hervey against Pope's attack, but Pope
— quoad Pope, the poet, — against all the
world, in the unjustifiable attempts begun by
Warton, and carried on at this day by the
new school of critics and scribblers, who
think themselves poets because they do not
write like Pope. I have no patience with
such cursed humbug and bad taste ; your
whole generation are not worth a canto
of the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay
on Man, or the Dunciad, or "anything that
is his.'"
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 22 1
171. There is nothing which needs explana-
tion in the brevities and amenities of these
two fragments, except, in the first of them,
the distinctive and exhaustive enumeration of
the qualities of great poetry, — and note especi-
ally the order in which he puts these.
A. Sense. That is to say, the first thing
you have to think of is whether the would-be
poet is a wise man — so also in the answer to
Blackwood, 'They call him (Pope) the poet
of reason ! — is that any reason why he should
not be a poet ? '
B. Learning. The Ayrshire ploughman
may have good gifts, but he is out of
court with relation to Homer, or Dante, or
Milton.
C. Effect. Has he efficiency in his verse ?
— does it tell on the ear and the spirit in
an instant? See the 'effect' on her audience
of Beatrice's ' ottave,' in the story at p. 286 of
Miss Alexander's Songs of Tuscany.
D. Imagination. Put thus low because
many novelists and artists have this faculty,
yet are not poets, or even good novelists or
painters; because they have not sense to
manage it, nor the art to give it effect.
22 2 PR^TERITA.
E. Passion. Lower yet, because all good
men and women have as much as either they
or the poet ought to have.
F. Invention. And this lowest, because one
may be a good poet without having this at
all. Byron had scarcely any himself, while
Scott had any quantity — yet never could write
a play.
172. But neither the force and precision,
nor the rhythm, of Byron's language, were at
all the central reasons for my taking him for
master. Knowing the Song of Moses and
the Sermon on the Mount by heart, and half
the Apocalypse besides, I was in no need of
tutorship either in the majesty or simplicity of
English words ; and for their logical arrange-
ment, I had had Byron's own master, Pope,
since I could lisp. But the thing wholly
new and precious to me in Byron was his
measured and living truth — measured, as com-
pared with Homer ; and living, as compared
with everybody else. My own inexorable
measuring wand, — not enchanter's, but cloth-
worker's and builder's, — reduced to mere in-
credibility all the statements of the poets
usually called sublime. It was of no use for
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 22 3
Homer to tell me that Pelion was put on the
top of Ossa. I knew perfectly well it wouldn't
go on the top of Ossa. Of no use for Pope
to tell me that trees where his mistress looked i
would crowd into a shade, because I was
satisfied that they would do nothing of the
sort. Nay, the whole world, as it was de-
scribed to me either by poetry or theology,
was every hour becoming more and more
shadowy and impossible. I rejoiced in all
stories of Pallas and Venus, of Achilles and
Eneas, of Elijah and St. John : but, without
doubting in my heart that there were real
spirits of wisdom and beauty, nor that there
had been invincible heroes and inspired pro-
phets, I felt already, with fatal and increasing
sadness, that there was no clear utterance
about any of them — that there were for me
neither Goddess guides nor prophetic teachers ;
and that the poetical histories, whether of
this world or the next, were to me as the
words of Peter to the shut up disciples — ' as
idle tales ; and they believed them not.'
173. But here at last I had found a man
who spoke only of what he had seen, and
known ; and spoke without exaggeration,
2 24 PR-iETERITA.
without mystery, without enmity, and without
mercy. ' That is so ; — make what you will of
it ! ' Shakespeare said the Alps voided their
rheum on the valleys, which indeed is pre-
cisely true, with the final truth, in that matter,
of James Forbes, — but it was told in a mythic
manner, and with an unpleasant British bias
to the nasty. But Byron, saying that ' the
glacier's cold and restless mass moved onward
day by day,' said plainly what he saw and
knew, — no more. So also, the Arabian
Nights had told me of thieves who lived in
enchanted caves, and beauties who fought
with genii in the air; but Byron told me of
thieves with whom he had ridden on their
own hills, and of the fair Persians or Greeks
who lived and died under the very sun that
rose over my visible Norwood hills.
And in this narrow, but sure, truth, to
Byron, as already to me, it appeared that
Love was a transient thing, and Death a
dreadful one. He did not attempt to console
me for Jessie's death, by saying she was
happier in Heaven ; or for Charles's, by say-
ing it was a Providential dispensation to me
on Earth. He did not tell me that war was a
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 22 5
just price for the glory of captains, or that the
National command of murder diminished its
guilt. Of all things within range of human
thought he felt the facts, and discerned the
natures with accurate justice.
But even all this he might have done, and
yet been no master of mine, had not he
sympathized with me in reverent love of
beauty, and indignant recoil from ugliness.
The witch of the Staubbach in her rainbow
was a greatly more pleasant vision than
Shakespeare's, like a rat without a tail, or
Burns's, in her cutty sark. The sea-king ^
Conrad had an immediate advantage with me
over Coleridge's long, lank, brown, and
ancient, mariner; and whatever Pope might
have gracefully said, or honestly felt of
Windsor woods and streams, was mere tink-
ling cymbal to me, compared with Byron's
love of Lachin-y-Gair.
174. I must pause here, in tracing the
sources of his influence over me, lest the
reader should mistake the analysis which I am
now able to give them, for a description of
the feelings possible to me at fifteen. Most
of these, however, were assuredly within the
vol. 1. p
2 26 PR^.TERITA.
knot of my unfolding mind — as the saffron of
the crocus yet beneath the earth ; and Byron
— though he could not teach me to love moun-
tains or sea more than I did in childhood, first
animated them for me with the sense of real
human nobleness and grief. He taught me
the meaning of Chillon and of Meillerie, and
bade me seek first in Venice — the ruined
homes of Foscari and Falier.
And observe, the force with which he struck
depended again on there being unquestionable
reality of person in his stories, as of principle
in- his thoughts. Romance, enough and to
spare, I had learnt from Scott — but his Lady
of the Lake was as openly fictitious as his
White Maid of Avenel : while Rogers was a
mere dilettante, who felt no difference between
landing where Tell leaped ashore, or standing
where ' St. Preux has stood.' Even Shake-
speare's Venice was visionary ; and Portia as
impossible as Miranda. But Byron told me
of, and reanimated for me, the real people
whose feet had worn the marble I trod on.
175- ^ ne word only, though it trenches on
a future subject, I must permit myself about
his rhythm. Its natural flow in almost prosaic
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 2 27
simplicity and tranquillity interested me ex-
tremely, in opposition alike to the symmetrical
clauses of Pope's logical metre, and to the
balanced strophes of classic and Hebrew verse.
But though I followed his manner instantly in
what verses I wrote for my own amusement,
my respect for the structural, as opposed to
fluent, force of the classic measures, supported
as it was partly by Byron's contempt for his
own work, and partly by my own architect's
instinct for ' the principle of the pyramid,'
made me long endeavour, in forming my prose
style, to keep the cadences of Pope and John-
son for all serious statement. Of Johnson's
influence on me I have to give account in the
last chapter of this volume ; meantime, I must
get back to the days of mere rivulet-singing,
in my poor little watercress life.
176. I had a sharp attack of pleurisy in the
spring of '35, which gave me much gasping
pain, and put me in some danger for three
or four days, during which our old family
physician, Dr. Walshman, and my mother,
defended me against the wish of all other
scientific people to have me bled. ' He wants
all the blood he has in him to fight the illness/
228 PR^TERITA.
said the old doctor, and brought me well
through, weak enough, however, to claim a
fortnight's nursing and petting afterwards,
during which I read the ' Fair Maid of Perth,'
learned the song of ' Poor Louise,' and feasted
on Stanfield's drawing of St. Michael's Mount,
engraved in the ' Coast Scenery,' and Turner's
Santa Saba, Pool of Bethesda, and Corinth,
engraved in the Bible series, lent me by
Richard Fall's little sister. I got an immense
quantity of useful learning out of those four
plates, and am very thankful to possess now
the originals of the Bethesda and Corinth.
Moreover, I planned all my proceedings on
the journey to Switzerland, which was to
begin the moment I was strong enough. I
shaded in cobalt a ' cyanometer ' to measure
the blue of the sky with ; bought a ruled note-
book for geological observations, and a large
quarto for architectural sketches, with square
rule and foot-rule ingeniously fastened outside.
And I determined that the events and senti-
ments of this journey should be described in a
poetic diary in the style of Don Juan, artfully
combined with that of Childe Harold. Two
cantos of this work were indeed finished —
VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE. 2 29
carrying me across France to Chamouni —
where I broke down, finding that I had ex-
hausted on the Jura all the descriptive terms
at my disposal, and that none were left for
the Alps. I must try to give, in the next
chapter, some useful account of the same part
of the journey in less exalted language.
CHAPTER IX.
THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE.
177. About the moment in the forenoon
when the modern fashionable traveller, intent
on Paris, Nice, and Monaco, and started by
the morning mail from Charing Cross, has a
little recovered himself from the qualms of
his crossing, and the irritation of fighting for
seats at Boulogne, and begins to look at his
watch to see how near he is to the buffet of
Amiens, he is apt to be baulked and worried
by the train's useless stop at one inconsider-
able station, lettered ABBEVILLE. As the
carriage gets in motion again, he may see, if
he cares to lift his eyes for an instant from his
newspaper, two square towers, with a curi-
ously attached bit of traceried arch, dominant
over the poplars and osiers of the marshy
level he is traversing. Such glimpse is pro-
bably all he will ever wish to get of them ;
and I scarcely know how far I can make even
230
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 23 I
the most sympathetic reader understand their
power over my own life.
The country town in which they are central,
— once, like Croyland, a mere monk's and
peasant's refuge (so for some time called
'Refuge'), — among the swamps of Somme,
received about the year 650 the name of
'Abbatis Villa,'— « Abbot's-ford,' I had like
to have written : house and village, I suppose
we may rightly say, — as the chief depend-
ence of the great monastery founded by St.
Riquier at his native place, on the hillside
five miles east of the present town. Con-
cerning which saint I translate from the
Dict re des Sciences Ecclesq ues , what it may
perhaps be well for the reader, in present
political junctures, to remember for more
weighty reasons than any arising out of such
interest as he may take in my poor little
nascent personality.
178. 'St. Riquier, in Latin " Sanctus Rich-
arius," born in the village of Centula, at two
leagues from Abbeville, was so touched by the
piety of two holy priests of Ireland, whom he
had hospitably received, that he also embraced
"la penitence." Being ordained priest, he
232 PR^ETERITA.
devoted himself to preaching, and so passed
into England. Then, returning into Ponthieu,
he became, by God's help, powerful in work
and word in leading the people to repentance.
He preached at the court of Dagobert, and, a
little while after that prince's death, founded
the monastery which bore his name, and
another, called Forest-Moutier, in the wood
of Crecy, where he ended his life and
penitence.'
I find further in the Ecclesiastical History
of Abbeville, published in 1646 at Paris
by Francois Pelican, ' Rue St. Jacques, a
l'enseigne du Pelican,' that St. Riquier was
himself of royal blood, that St. Angilbert,
the seventh abbot, had married Charlemagne's
second daughter Bertha — ' qui se rendit
aussi Religieuse de l'ordre de Saint Be-
noist.' Louis, the eleventh abbot, was cousin-
german to Charles the Bald ; the twelfth
was St. Angilbert's son, Charlemagne's grand-
son. Raoul, the thirteenth abbot, was the
brother of the Empress Judith ; and Car-
loman, the sixteenth, was the son of Charles
the Bald.
179. Lifting again your eyes, good reader,
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE.
2 33
as the train gets to its speed, you may see
gleaming opposite on the hillside the white
village and its abbey, — not, indeed, the walls
of the home of these princes and princesses,
(afterwards again and again ruined,) but the
still beautiful abbey built on their foundations
by the monks of St. Maur.
In the year when the above quoted history
of Abbeville was written (say 1600 for surety),
the town, then familiarly called 'Faithful
Abbeville,' contained 40,000 souls, 'living
in great unity among themselves, of a marvel-
lous frankness, fearing to do wrong to their
neighbour, the women modest, honest, full
of faith and charity, and adorned with a
goodness and beauty toute innocente : the
noblesse numerous, hardy, and adroit in arms,
the masterships (maistrises) of arts and trades,
with excellent workers in every profession
under sixty-four Mayor-Bannerets, who are
the chiefs of the trades, and elect the mayor
of the city, who is an independent Home
Ruler, de grande probite, d'authorite, et sans
reproche, aided by four eschevins of the
present, and four of the past year; having
authority of justice, police, and war, and right
2 34 PRETERIT A.
to keep the weights and measures true and
unchanged, and to punish those who abuse
them, or sell by false weight or measure, or
sell anything without the town's mark on it.'
Moreover, the town contained, besides the
great church of St. Wulfran, thirteen parish
churches, six monasteries, eight nunneries,
and five hospitals, among which churches
I am especially bound to name that of St.
George, begun by our own Edward in 1368,
on the 10th of January ; transferred and
reconsecrated in 1469 by the Bishop of
Bethlehem, and enlarged by the Marguilliers
in 1536, ' because the congregation had so
increased that numbers had to remain outside
on days of solemnity.'
These reconstructions took place with so
great ease and rapidity at Abbeville, owing
partly to the number of its unanimous work-
men, partly to the easily workable quality
of the stone they used, and partly to the
uncertainty of a foundation always on piles,
that there is now scarce vestige left of any
building prior to the fifteenth century. St.
Wulfran itself, with St. Riquier, and all that
remain of the parish churches (four only, now,
ik. THE COL Dl£ LA FAUCILLE. 23 5
I believe, besides St. Wulfran), are of the
same flamboyant Gothic, — walls and towers
alike coeval with the gabled timber houses
of which the busier streets chiefly consisted
when first I saw them.
1 80. I must here, in advance, tell the
general reader that there have been, in sum,
three centres of my life's thought : Rouen,
Geneva, and Pisa. All that I did at Venice
was bye-work, because her history had been
falsely written before, and not even by any
of her own people understood ; and because,
in the world of painting, Tintoret was vir-
tually unseen, Veronese unfelt, Carpaccio
not so much as named, when I began
to study them ; something also was due
to my love of gliding about in gondolas.
But Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa have been
tutresses of all I know, and were mistresses
of all I did, from the first moments I entered
their gates.
In this journey of 1835 I first saw Rouen
and Venice — Pisa not till 1840; nor could I
understand the full power of any of those great
scenes till much later. But for Abbeville,
which is the preface and interpretation of
236 PRiETERITA.
Rouen, I was ready on that 5th of June, and
felt that here was entrance for me into
immediately healthy labour and joy.
181. For here I saw that art (of its local
kind), religion, and present human life, were
yet in perfect harmony. There were no dead
six days and dismal seventh in those sculp-
tured churches ; there was no beadle to lock
me out of them, or pew-shutter to shut me in.
I might haunt them, fancying myself a ghost ;
peep round their pillars, like Rob Roy ; kneel
in them, and scandalize nobody ; draw in them,
and disturb none. Outside, the faithful old
town gathered itself, and nestled under their
buttresses like a brood beneath the mother's
wings; the quiet, uninjurious aristocracy of
the newer town opened into silent streets,
between self-possessed and hidden dignities
of dwelling, each with its courtyard and
richly trellised garden. The commercial
square, with the main street of traverse, con-
sisted of uncompetitive shops, such as were
needful, of the native wares : cloth and
hosiery spun, woven, and knitted within the
walls; cheese of neighbouring Neuchatel ;
fruit of their own gardens, bread from the
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 237
fields above the green coteaux ; meat of their
herds, untainted by American tin ; smith's
work of sufficient scythe and ploughshare,
hammered on the open anvil ; groceries dainty,
the coffee generally roasting odoriferously in
the street, before the door; for the modistes,
— well, perhaps a bonnet or two from Paris,
the rest, wholesome dress for peasant and
dame of Ponthieu. Above the prosperous,
serenely busy and beneficent shop, the old
dwelling - house of its ancestral masters ;
pleasantly carved, proudly roofed, keeping
its place, and order, and recognised function,
unfailing, unenlarging, for centuries. Round
all, the breezy ramparts, with their long
waving avenues ; through all, in variously
circuiting cleanness and sweetness of navi-
gable river and active millstream, the green
chalk-water of the Somme.
My most intense happinesses have of course
been among mountains. But for cheerful, un-
alloyed, unwearying pleasure, the getting in
sight of Abbeville on a fine summer afternoon,
jumping out in the courtyard of the Hotel de
l'Europe, and rushing down the street to see
St. Wulfran again before the sun was off the
238 PR^ETERITA.
towers, are things to cherish the past for, — to
the end.
182. Of Rouen, and its Cathedral, my say-
ing remains yet to be said, if days be given
me, in ' Our Fathers have told us.' The sight
of them, and following journey up the Seine
to Paris, then to Soissons and Rheims, deter-
mined, as aforesaid, the first centre and circle
of future life-work. Beyond Rheims, at Bar-
le-Duc, I was brought again within the greater
radius of the Alps, and my father was kind
enough to go down by Plombieres to Dijon,
that I might approach them by the straightest
pass of Jura.
The reader must pardon my relating so
much as I think he may care to hear of this
journey of 1835, rather as what used to happen,
than as limitable to that date ; for it is ex-
tremely difficult for me now to separate the
circumstances of an}' one journey from those
of subsequent days, in which we stayed at the
same inns, with variation only from the blue
room to the green, saw the same sights, and
rejoiced the more in every pleasure — that it
was not new.
And this latter part of the road from Paris
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 239
to Geneva, beautiful without being the least
terrific or pathetic, but in the most lovable and
cheerful way, became afterwards so dear and
so domestic to me, that I will not attempt here
to check my gossip of it.
183. We used always to drive out of the
yard of La Cloche at Dijon in early morning —
seven, after joyful breakfast at half-past six.
The small saloon on the first floor to the
front had a bedroom across the passage at
the west end of it, whose windows commanded
the cathedral towers over a low roof on the
opposite side of the street. This was always
mine, and its bed was in an alcove at the
back, separated only by a lath partition from
an extremely narrow passage leading from
the outer gallery to Anne's room. It was a
delight for Anne to which I think she looked
forward all across France, to open a little
hidden door from this passage, at the back of
the alcove exactly above my pillow, and sur-
prise, or wake, me in the morning.
I think I only remember once starting in
rain. Usually the morning sun shone through
the misty spray and far thrown diamonds of
the fountain in the south-eastern suburb, and
24O PR/ETERITA.
threw long poplar shadows across the road to
Genlis.
Genlis, Auxonne, Dole, Mont-sous- Vaudrey
— three stages of 12 or 14 kilometres each,
two of 18; in all about 70 kilometres = 42
miles, from Dijon gate to Jura foot — we went
straight for the hills always, lunching on French
plums and bread.
Level plain of little interest to Auxonne.
I used to wonder how any mortal creature
could be content to live within actual sight
of Jura, and never go to see them, all their
lives ! At Auxonne, cross the Saone, wide
and beautiful in clear shallows of green stream
— little more, yet, than a noble mountain
torrent ; one saw in an instant it came from
Jura. Another hour of patience, and from
the broken yellow limestone slopes of Dole
— there, at last, they were — the long blue
surges of them fading as far as eye could see
to the south, more abruptly near to the north-
east, where the bold outlier, almost island,
of them, rises like a precipitous Wrekin,
above Salins. Beyond Dole, a new wildness
comes into the more undulating country,
notable chiefly for its clay-built cottages
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 24 1
with enormously high thatched gables of
roof. Strange, that I never inquired into
the special reason of that form, nor looked
into a single cottage to see the mode of its
inhabitation !
1 84. The village, or rural town, of Poligny,
clustered out of well-built old stone houses,
with gardens and orchards; and gathering at
the midst of it into some pretence or manner
of a street, straggles along the roots of Jura
at the opening of a little valley, which in
Yorkshire or Derbyshire limestone would
have been a gorge between nodding cliffs,
with a pretty pattering stream at the bottom :
but, in Jura is a far retiring theatre of rising
terraces, with bits of field and garden getting
foot on them at various heights ; a spiry
convent in its hollow, and well-built little
nests of husbandry-building set in corners
of meadow, and on juts of rock; — no stream,
to speak of, nor springs in it, nor the smallest
conceivable reason for its being there, but that
God made it.
'Far' retiring, I said, — perhaps a mile into
the hills from the outer plain, by half a mile
across, permitting the main road from Paris
VOL. I. q
242 PR.^TERITA.
to Geneva to serpentine and zigzag capri-
ciously up the cliff terraces with innocent
engineering, finding itself every now and
then where it had no notion of getting to,
and looking, in a circumflex of puzzled level,
where it was to go next; — retrospect of the
plain of Burgundy enlarging under its back-
ward sweeps, till at last, under a broken bit
of steep final crag, it got quite up the side,
and out over the edge of the ravine, where
said ravine closes as unreasonably as it had
opened, and the surprised traveller finds him-
self, magically as if he were Jack of the Bean-
stalk, in a new plain of an upper world. A
world of level rock, breaking at the surface
into yellow soil, capable of scanty, but healthy,
turf, and sprinkled copse and thicket ; with
here and there, beyond, a blue surge of pines,
and over those, if the evening or morning
were clear, always one small bright silvery
likeness of a cloud.
185. These first tracts of Jura differ in
many pleasant ways from the limestone levels
round Ingleborough, which are their English
t} r pes. The Yorkshire moors are mostly by
a hundred or two feet higher, and exposed
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 243
to drift of rain under violent, nearly constant,
wind. They break into wide fields of loose
blocks, and rugged slopes of shale ; and are
mixed with sands and clay from the millstone
grit, which nourish rank grass, and lodge in
occasional morass : the wild winds also for-
bidding any vestige or comfort of tree, except
here and there in a sheltered nook of new
plantation. But the Jura sky is as calm and
clear as that of the rest of France ; if the
day is bright on the plain, the bounding hills
are bright also; the Jura rock, balanced in
the make of it between chalk and marble,
weathers indeed into curious rifts and
furrows, but rarely breaks loose, and has
long ago clothed itself either with forest
flowers, or with sweet short grass, and all
blossoms that love sunshine. The pure air,
even on this lower ledge of a thousand feet
above sea, cherishes their sweetest scents and
liveliest colours, and the winter gives them
rest under thawless serenity of snow.
186. A still greater and stranger difference
exists in the system of streams. For all their
losing themselves and hiding, and intermitting,
their presence is distinctly felt on a Yorkshire
244 PRJETERITA.
moor; one sees the places they have been in
yesterday, the wells where they will flow after
the next shower, and a tricklet here at the
bottom of a crag, or a tinkle there from the
top of it, is always making one think whether
this is one of the sources of Aire, or rootlets
of Ribble, or beginnings of Bolton Strid, or
threads of silver which are to be spun into
Tees.
But' no whisper, nor murmur, nor patter,
nor song, of streamlet disturbs the enchanted
silence of open Jura. The rain-cloud clasps
her cliffs, and floats along her fields; it passes,
and in an hour the rocks are dry, and only
beads of dew left in the Alchemilla leaves, —
but of rivulet, or brook, — no vestige yesterday,
or to-day, or to-morrow. Through unseen
fissures and filmy crannies the waters of cliff
and plain have alike vanished, only far down
in the depths of the main valley glides the
strong river, unconscious of change.
187. One is taught thus much for one's
earliest lesson, in the two stages from Poligny
to Champagnole, level over the absolutely
crisp turf and sun-bright rock, without so
much water anywhere as a cress could grow
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 245
in, or a tadpole wag his tail in, — and then, by
a zigzag of shady road, forming the Park and
Boulevard of the wistful little village, down
to the single arched bridge that leaps the Ain,
which pauses underneath in magnificent pools
of clear pale green: the green of spring leaves;
then clashes into foam, half weir, half natural
cascade, and into a confused race of currents
beneath hollow overhanging of crag festooned
with leafage. The only marvel is, to anyone
knowing Jura structure, that rivers should
be visible anywhere at all, and that the rocks
should be consistent enough to carry them in
open air through the great valleys, without
perpetual ' pertes ' like that of the Rhone.
Below the Lac de Joux the Orbe thus loses
itself indeed, reappearing seven hundred feet *
beneath in a scene of which I permit myself to
quote my Papa Saussure's description.
1 88. 'A semicircular rock at least two hun-
dred feet high, composed of great horizontal
rocks hewn vertical, and divided f by ranks of
pine which grow on their projecting ledges,
closes to the west the valley of Valorbe.
* Six hundred and eighty French feet. Saussure, §§ 385.
t ' Tailles a pic, et entrecoupees.'
246
PRyETERITA.
Mountains yet more elevated and covered with
forests, form a circuit round this rock, which
opens only to give passage to the Orbe, whose
source is at its foot. Its waters, of a perfect
limpidity, flow at first with a majestic tran-
quillity upon a bed tapestried with beautiful
green moss (Fontinalis antipyretica), but soon,
drawn into a steep slope, the thread of the
current breaks itself in foam against the rocks
which occupy the middle of its bed, while the
borders, less agitated, flowing alwaj^s on their
green ground, set off the whiteness of the
midst of the river; and thus it withdraws
itself from sight, in following the course of a
deep valley covered with pines, whose black-
ness is rendered more striking by the vivid
green of the beeches which are scattered
among them.
'Ah, if Petrarch had seen this spring and
had found there his Laura, how much would
not he have preferred it to that of Vaucluse,
more abundant, perhaps, and more rapid, but
of which the sterile rocks have neither the
greatness of ours, nor the rich parure, which
embellishes them.'
I have never seen the source of the Orbe,
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 247
but would commend to the reader's notice the
frequent beauty of these great springs in
literally rising at the base of cliffs, instead
of falling, as one would have imagined likely,
out of clefts in the front of them. In our
own English antitype of the source of Orbe,
Malham Cove, the flow of water is, in like
manner, wholly at the base of the rock, and
seems to rise to the ledge of its outlet from
a deeper interior pool.
189. The old Hotel de la Poste at Cham-
pagnole stood just above the bridge of Ain,
opposite the town, where the road got level
again as it darted away towards Geneva. I
think the year 1842 was the first in which we
lengthened the day from Dijon by the two
stages beyond Poligny ; but afterwards, the
Hotel de la Poste at Champagnole became a
kind of home to us : going out, we had so
much delight there, and coming home, so
many thoughts, that a great space of life
seemed to be passed in its peace. No one
was ever in the house but ourselves ; if a
family stopped every third day or so, it was
enough to maintain the inn, which, besides,
had its own farm ; and those who did stop,
248 PR/ETERITA.
rushed away for Geneva early in the morning.
We, who were to sleep again at Morez, were
in no hurry ; and in returning always left
Geneva on Friday, to get the Sunday at
Champagnole.
190. But my own great joy was in the
early June evening, when we had arrived
from Dijon, and I got out after the quickly
dressed trout and cutlet for the first walk on
rock and under pine.
With all my Tory prejudice (I mean, prin-
ciple), I have to confess that one great joy
of Swiss — above all, Jurassic Swiss — ground
to me, is in its effectual, not merely theoretic,
liberty. Among the greater hills, one can't
always go just where one chooses, — all around
is the too far, or too steep, — one wants to get
to this, and climb that, and can't do either;
— but in Jura one can go every way, and be
happy everywhere. Generally, if there was
time, I used to climb the islet of crag to the
north of the village, on which there are a few
grey walls of ruined castle, and the yet trace-
able paths of its ' pleasance,' whence to look
if the likeness of white cloud were still on
the horizon. Still there, in the clear evening,
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 249
and again and again, each year more mar-
vellous to me; the derniers rochers, and
calotte of Mont Blanc. Only those ; that is
to say just as much as may be seen over the
Dome du Goute from St. Martin's. But it
looks as large from Champagnole as it does
there — glowing in the last light like a harvest
moon.
If there were not time to reach the castle
rock, at least I could get into the woods
above the Ain, and gather my first Alpine
flowers. Again and again, I feel the duty
of gratitude to the formalities and even vul-
garities of Heme Hill, for making me to
feel by contrast the divine wildness of Jura
forest.
Then came the morning drive into the
higher glen of the Ain, where the road began
first to wind beside the falling stream. One
never understands how those winding roads
steal with their tranquil slope from height to
height ; it was but an hour's walking beside
the carriage, — an hour passed like a minute ;
and one emerged on the high plain of St.
Laurent, and the gentians began to gleam
among the roadside grass, and the pines swept
2 50 PRiKTERITA.
round the horizon with the dark infinitude of
ocean.
191. All Switzerland was there in hope
and sensation, and what was less than
Switzerland was in some sort better, in its
meek simplicity and healthy purity. The
Jura cottage is not carved with the stately
richness of the Bernese, nor set together
with the antique strength of Uri. It is
covered with thin slit fine shingles, side-
roofed as it were to the ground for mere
dryness' sake, a little crossing of laths here
and there underneath the window its only
ornament. It has no daintiness of garden
nor wealth of farm about it, — is indeed
little more than a delicately- built chalet,
yet trim and domestic, mildly intelligent of
things other than pastoral, watch -making
and the like, though set in the midst of
the meadows, the gentian at its door,
the lily of the valley wild in the copses
hard by.
My delight in these cottages, and in the
sense of human industry and enjoyment
through the whole scene, was at the root
of all pleasure in its beauty; see the passage
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 2 51
afterwards written in the " Seven Lamps " in-
sisting on this as if it were general to human
nature thus to admire through sympathy. I
have noticed since, with sorrowful accuracy,
how many people there are who, wherever
they find themselves, think only ' of their
position.' But the feeling which gave me so
much happiness, both then and through life,
differed also curiously, in its impersonal char-
acter, from that of many even of the best and
kindest persons.
192. In the beginning of the Carlyle-
Emerson correspondence, edited with too little
comment by my dear friend Charles Norton,
I find at page 18 this — to me entirely dis-
putable, and to my thought, so far as
undisputed, much blameable and pitiable, ex-
clamation 01 my master's : ' Not till we can
think that here and there one is thinking of
us, one is loving us, does this waste earth
become a peopled garden.' My training, as
the reader has perhaps enough perceived,
produced in me the precisely opposite senti-
ment. My times of happiness had always
been when nobody was thinking of me ; and
the main discomfort and drawback to all
2 52 PR^ETERITA.
proceedings and designs, the attention and
interference of the public — represented by my
mother and the gardener. The garden was
no waste place to me, because I did not sup-
pose myself an object of interest either to the
ants or the butterflies ; and the only qualifi-
cation of the entire delight of my evening
walk at Champagnole or St. Laurent was the
sense that my father and mother were think-
ing of me, and would be frightened if I was
five minutes late for tea.
I don't mean in the least that I could have
done without them. They were, to me, much
more than Carlyle's wife to him ; and if Car-
lyle had written, instead of, that he wanted
Emerson to think of him in America, that he
wanted his father and mother to be thinking
of him at Ecclefechan, it had been well. But
that the rest of the world was waste to him'
unless he had admirers in it, is a sorry state
of sentiment enough ; and I am somewhat
tempted, for once, to admire the exactly
opposite temper of my own solitude. My
entire delight was in observing without being
myself noticed, — if I could have been invisible,
all the better. I was absolutely interested in
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 2 5 3
men and their ways, as I was interested in
marmots and chamois, in tomtits and trout.
If only they would stay still and let me look
at them, and not get into their holes and up
their heights ! The living inhabitation of the
world — the grazing and nesting in it, — the
spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the
waters, to be in the midst of it, and rejoice
and wonder at it, and help it if I could, — •
happier if it needed no help of mine, — this
was the essential love of Nature in me, this
the root of all that I have usefully become,
and the light of all that I have rightly
learned.
193. Whether we slept at St. Laurent or
Morez, the morning of the next day was an
eventful one. In ordinarily fine weather, the
ascent from Morez to Les Rousses, walked
most of the way, was mere enchantment ; so
also breakfast, and fringed-gentian gathering,
at Les Rousses. Then came usually an hour
of tortured watching the increase of the noon
clouds; for, however early we had risen, it
was impossible to reach the Col de la Faucille
before two o'clock, or later if we had bad
horses, and at two o'clock, if there are clouds
254 pr^eterita.
above Jura, there will be assuredly clouds on
the Alps.
It is worth notice, Saussure himself not
having noticed it, that this main pass of
Jura, unlike the great passes of the Alps,
reaches its traverse-point very nearly under
the highest summit of that part of the chain.
The col, separating the source of the Bienne,
which runs down to Morez and St. Claude,
from that of the Valserine, which winds
through the midst of Jura to the Rhone at
Bellegarde, is a spur of the Dole itself, under
whose prolonged masses the road is then
carried six miles farther, ascending very
slightly to the Col de la Faucille, where the
chain opens suddenly, and a sweep of the
road, traversed in five minutes at a trot,
opens the whole Lake of Geneva, and the
chain of the Alps along a hundred miles of
horizon.
194. I have never seen that view perfectly
but once — in this year 1835 ; when I drew it
carefully in my then fashion, and have been
content to look back to it as the confirming
sequel of the first view of the Alps from
Schaffhausen. Very few travellers, even in
IX. THE COL DE LA FAUCILLE. 25 5
old times, saw it at all; tired of the long
posting journey from Paris, by the time they
got to the col they were mostly thinking
only of their dinners and rest at Geneva;
the guide books said nothing about it; and
though, for everybody, it was an inevitable
task to ascend the Righi, nobody ever thought
there was anything to be seen from the
Dole.
Both mountains have had enormous in-
fluence on my whole life; — the Dole con-
tinually and calmly; the Righi at sorrowful
intervals, as will be seen. But the Col de
la Faucille, on that day of 1835, opened to
me in distinct vision the Holy Land of my
future work and true home in this world.
My eyes had been opened, and my heart
with them, to see and to possess royally
such a kingdom ! Far as the eye could
reach — that land and its moving or pausing
waters; Arve, and his gates of Cluse, and
his glacier fountains ; Rhone, and the in-
finitude of his sapphire lake, — his peace
beneath the narcissus meads of Vevay — his
cruelty beneath the promontories of Sierre.
And all that rose against and melted into
256 PRiETERITA.
the sky, of mountain and mountain snow ;
and all that living plain, burning with human
gladness — studded with white homes, — a
milky way of star-dwellings cast across its
sunlit blue.
CHAPTER X.
QUEM TU, MELPOMENE.
195. WHETHER in the biography of a nation,
or of a single person, it is alike impos-
sible to trace it steadily through successive
years. Some forces are failing while others
strengthen, and most act irregularly, or else at
uncorresponding periods of renewed enthu-
siasm after intervals of lassitude. For all
clearness of exposition, it is necessary to
follow first one, then another, without con-
fusing notices of what is happening in other
directions.
I must accordingly cease talk of pictorial
and rhythmic efforts of the year 1835, at this
point ; and go back to give account of another
segment of my learning, which might have
had better consequence than ever came of it,
had the stars so pleased.
196. I cannot, and perhaps the reader
will be thankful, remember anything of the
vol. 1. 2S7 R
2 58 PR/ETERITA.
Apolline instincts under which I averred to
incredulous papa and mamma that, ' though I
could not speak, I could play upon the fiddle.'
But even to this day, I look back with starts
of sorrow to a lost opportunity of showing
what was in me, of that manner of genius, on
the occasion of a grand military dinner in the
state room of the Sussex, at Tunbridge Wells ;
where, when I was something about eight or
nine years old, we were staying in an unadven-
turous manner, enjoying the pantiles, the
common, the sight, if not the taste, of the
lovely fountain, and drives to the High Rocks.
After the military dinner there was military
music, and by connivance of waiters, Anne
and I got in, somehow, mixed up with the
dessert. I believe I was rather a pretty boy
then, and dressed in a not wholly civilian
manner, in a sort of laced and buttoned sur-
tout. My mind was extremely set on watch-
ing the instrumental manoeuvres of the band,
— with admiration of all, but burning envy of
the drummer.
The colonel took notice of my rapt attention,
and sent an ensign to bring me round to him ;
and after getting, I know not how, at my mind
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 259
in the matter, told me I might go and ask the
drummer to give me his lovely round-headed
sticks, and he would. I was in two minds to
do it, having good confidence in my powers of
keeping time. But the dismal shyness con-
quered :— I shook my head woefully, and my
musical career was blighted. No one will ever
know what I could then have brought out of
that drum, or (if my father had perchance
taken me to Spain) out of a tambourine.
197. My mother, busy in graver matters,
had never cultivated the little she had been
taught of music, though her natural sensibility
to it was great. Mrs. Richard Gray used
sometimes to play gracefully to me, but if ever
she struck a false note, her husband used to
put his fingers in his ears, and dance about
the room, exclaiming, ' O Mary, Mary dear ! '
and so extinguish her. Our own Perth Mary
played dutifully her scales, and little more ;
but I got useful help, almost unconsciously,
from a family of young people who ought, if
my chronology had been .systematic, to have
been affectionately spoken of long ago.
In above describing my father's counting-
house, I said the door was opened by a latch
2 60 PR^ETERITA.
pulled by the head clerk. This head clerk, or,
putting it more modestly, topmost of two clerks,
Henry Watson, was a person of much import
in my father's life and mine ; import which, I
perceive, looking back, to have been as in
many respects tender and fortunate, yet in
others extremely doleful, both to us and
himself.
The chief fault in my father's mind, (I say
so reverently, for its faults were few, but
necessarily, for they were very fatal,) was his
dislike of being excelled. He knew his own
power — felt that he had not nerve to use or
display it, in full measure ; but all the more,
could not bear, in his own sphere, any ap-
proach to equality. He chose his clerks first
for trustworthiness, secondly for — z/zcapacity.
I am not sure that he would have sent away
a clever one, if he had chanced on such a
person ; but he assuredly did not look for
mercantile genius in them, but rather for sub-
ordinates who would be subordinate for ever.
Frederick the Great chose his clerks in the
same way ; but then, his clerks never sup-
posed themselves likely to be king, while a
merchant's clerks are apt to hope they may
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 26 1
at least become partners, if not successors.
Also, Friedrich's clerks were absolutely fit for
their business ; but my father's clerks were,
in many ways, utterly unfit for theirs. Of
which unfitness my father greatly complaining,
nevertheless by no means bestirred himself to
find fitter ones. He used to send Henry
Watson on business tours, and assure him
afterwards that he had done more harm than
good : he would now and then leave Henry
Ritchie to write a business letter; and, I
think, find with some satisfaction that it was
needful afterwards to write two, himself, in
correction of it. There was scarcely a day
when he did not come home in some irritation
at something that one or other of them had
done, or not done. But they stayed with him
till his death.
198. Of the second in command, Mr. Ritchie,
I will say what is needful in another place ;
but the clerk of confidence, Henry Watson,
has already been left unnoticed too long. He
was, I believe, the principal support of a
widowed mother and three grown-up sisters,
amiable, well educated, and fairly sensible
women, all of them ; refined beyond the
262 PR^ETERITA.
average tone of their position, — and desirous,
not vulgarly, of keeping themselves in the
upper-edge circle of the middle class. Not vul-
garly, I say, as caring merely to have carriages
stopping at their door, but with real sense of
the good that is in good London society, in
London society's way. They liked, as they
did not drop their own h's, to talk with people
who did not drop theirs ; to hear what was
going on in polite circles; and to have entree
to a pleasant dance, or rightly given concert.
Being themselves both good and pleasing
musicians, (the qualities are not united in all
musicians,) this was not difficult for them; —
nevertheless it meant necessarily having a
house in a street of tone, near the Park, and
being nicely dressed, and giving now and then
a little reception themselves. On the whole,
it meant the total absorption of Henry's salary,
and of the earnings, in some official, or other-
wise plumaged occupations, of two brothers
besides, David and William. The latter, now
I think of it, was a West-End wine merchant,
supplying the nobility with Clos-Vougeot,
Hochheimer, dignifiedly still Champagne, and
other nectareous drinks, of which the bottom
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 263
fills up half the bottle, and which are only to
be had out of the cellars of Grand Dukes and
Counts of the Empire. The family lived, to
the edge of their means, — not too narrowly :
the young ladies enjoyed themselves, studied
German — and at that time it was thought very
fine and poetical to study German ; — sang
extremely well, gracefully and easily; had
good taste in dress, the better for being a
little matronly and old-fashioned : and the
whole family thought themselves extremely
£ite ) in a substantial and virtuous manner.
199. When Henry Watson was first taken,
(then, I believe, a boy of sixteen,) I know not
by what chance, or on what commendation,
into my father's counting-house, the opening
was thought by his family a magnificent one ;
they were very thankful and happy, and, of
course, in their brother's interest, eager to do
all they could to please my father and mother.
They found, however, my mother not very
easily pleased ; and presently began them-
selves to be not a little surprised and dis-
pleased by the way things went on, both in
the counting-house and at Heme Hill. At
the one, there was steady work ; at the other,
264
PR^TERITA.
little show: the clerks could by no means
venture to leave their desks for a garden-party,
and after dark were allowed only tallow
candles. That the head of the Firm should
live in the half of a party-walled house, beyond
the suburb of Camberwell, was a degradation
and disgrace to everybody connected with the
business ! and that Henry should be obliged
every morning to take omnibus into the
eastern City, and work within scent of Bill-
ingsgate, instead of walking elegantly across
Piccadilly to an office in St. James's Street,
was alike injurious to him, and disparaging to
my father's taste and knowledge of the world.
Also, to the feminine circle, my mother was a
singular, and sorrowfully intractable, pheno-
menon. Taking herself no interest in German
studies, and being little curious as to the
events, and little respectful to the opinions,
of Mayfair, she was apt to look with some
severity, perhaps a tinge of jealousy, on what
she thought pretentious in the accomplish-
ments, or affected in the manners, of the
young people : while they, on the other hand,
though quite sensible of my mother's worth,
grateful for her good will, and in time really
X. QUEMTU, MELPOMENE. 265
attached to her, were not disposed to pay
much attention to the opinions of a woman
who knew only her own language ; — and were
more restive than responsive under kindnesses
which frequently took the form of advice.
2O0. These differences in feeling, irrecon-
cilable though they were, did not hinder the
growth of consistently pleasant and sincerely
affectionate relations between my mother and
the young housewives. With what best of
girl nature was in them, Fanny, Helen, and
foolishest, cleverest little Juliet, enjoyed, in
spring time, exchanging for a day or two the
dusty dignity of their street of tone in Mayfair
for the lilacs and laburnums of Herne-hill :
and held themselves, with their brother Henry,
always ready at call to come out on any
occasion of the hill's hospitality to some re-
spected correspondent of the House, and sing
to us the prettiest airs from the new opera,
with a due foundation and tonic intermixture
of classical German.
Henry had a singularly beautiful tenor voice;
and the three sisters, though not, any one of
them, of special power, sang their parts with
sufficient precision, with intelligent taste, and
2 66 PR^TERITA.
with the pretty unison of sisterly voices.
In this way, from early childhood, I was
accustomed to hear a great range of good
music completely and rightly rendered, without
breakings down, missings out, affectations of
manner, or vulgar prominence of execution.
Had the quartette sung me English glees, or
Scotch ballads, or British salt water ones, or
had any one of the girls had gift enough to
render higher music with its proper splendour,
I might easily have been led to spare some
time from my maps and mineralogy for atten-
tive listening. As it was, the scientific German
compositions were simply tiresome to me, and
the pretty modulations of Italian, which I
understood no syllable of, pleasant only as the
trills of the blackbirds, who often listened, and
expressed their satisfaction by joining in the
part-songs through the window that opened to
the back garden in the spring evenings. Yet
the education of my ear and taste went on
without trouble of mine. I do not think I
ever heard any masterly professional music,
until, as good hap was, I heard the best, only
to be heard during a narrow space of those
young days.
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 267
201. I too carelessly left without explana-
tion the casual sentence about 'fatal dinner
at Mr. Domecq's ' when I was fourteen, above,
Chap. IV., p. 115. My father's Spanish
partner was at that time living in the Champs
Elysees, with his English wife and his five
daughters; the eldest, Diana, on the eve of
her marriage with one of Napoleon's officers,
Count Maison ; the four others, much younger,
chanced to be at home on vacation from their
convent school: and we had happy family
dinner with them, and mamma and the girls
and a delightful old French gentleman, Mr.
Badell, played afterwards at Ma toilette de
Madame' with me; only I couldn't remember
whether I was the necklace or the garters;
and then Clotilde and C£cile played 'les
Echos ' and other fascinations of dance-
melody, — only I couldn't dance; and at last
Elise had to take pity on me as above de-
scribed. But the best, if not the largest r part
of the conversation among the elders was of
the recent death of Bellini, the sorrow of all
Paris for him, and the power with which his ' I
Puritani ' was being rendered by the reigning
four great singers for whom it was written.
268 PRiETERITA.
202. It puzzles me that I have no recol-
lection of any first sight and hearing of an
opera. Not even, for that matter, of my first
going to a theatre, though I was full twelve,
before being taken ; and afterwards, it was a
matter of intense rapture, of a common sort,
to be taken to a pantomime. And I greatly
enjoy theatre to this day — it is one of the
pleasures that have least worn out ; yet, while
I remember Friar's Crag at Derwentwater
when I was four years old, and the courtyard
of our Paris inn at five, I have no memory
whatever, and am a little proud to have none,
of my first theatre. To be taken now at
Paris to the feebly dramatic ' Puritani ' was
no great joy to me ; but I then heard, and it
will always be a rare, and only once or twice
in a century possible, thing to hear, four
great musicians, all rightly to be called of
genius, singing together, with sincere desire
to assist each other, not eclipse; and to
exhibit, not only their own power of singing,
but the beauty of the music they sang.
203. Still more fortunately it happened that
a woman of faultless genius led the following
dances, — Taglioni ; a person of the highest
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 269
natural faculties, and stainlessly simple char-
acter, gathered with sincerest ardour and
reverence into her art. My mother, though
she allowed me without serious remonstrance
to be taken to the theatre by my father, had
the strictest Puritan prejudice against the
stage; yet enjoyed it so much that I think
she felt the sacrifice she made in not going
with us to be a sort of price accepted by
the laws of virtue for what was sinful in
her concession to my father and me. She
went, however, to hear and see this group
of players, renowned, without any rivals,
through all the cities of Europe ; — and,
strange and pretty to say, her instinct of the
innocence, beauty, and wonder, in every
motion of the Grace of her century, was so
strong, that from that time forth my mother
would always, at a word, go with us to see
Taglioni.
Afterwards, a season did not pass without
my hearing twice or thrice, at least, those
four singers ; and I learned the better because
my ear was never jaded the intention of the
music written for them, or studied by them ;
and am extremely glad now that I heard their
2 70 PR^TERITA.
renderings of Mozart and Rossini, neither of
whom can be now said ever to be heard at
all, owing to the detestable quickening of the
time. Grisi and Malibran sang at least one-
third slower than any modern cantatrice ; *
and Patti, the last time I heard her, massacred
Zerlina's part in ' La ci darem,' as if the
audience and she had but the one object of
getting Mozart's air done with, as soon as
possible.
204. Afterwards, (the confession may as
well be got over at once,) when I had got
settled in my furrow at Christ Church, it
chanced that the better men of the college had
founded a musical society, under instruction
of the cathedral organist, Mr. Marshall, an
extremely simple, good-natured, and good-
humoured person, by whose encouragement I
was brought to the point of trying to learn to
sing, ' Come mai posso vivere se Rosina non
m'ascolta,' and to play the two lines of prelude
to the 'A te o cara,' and what notes I could
manage to read of accompaniments to other
* It is a pretty conceit of musical people to call them-
selves scientific, when they have not yet fixed their unit of
time !
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 271
songs of similarly tender purport. In which,
though never even getting so far as to read
with ease, I nevertheless, between my fine
rhythmic ear, and true lover's sentiment, got
to understand some principles of musical art,
which I shall perhaps be able to enforce with
benefit on the musical public mind, even
to-day, if only I can get first done with this
autobiography.
What the furrow at Christ Church was
to be like, or where to lead, none of my people
seem at this time to have been thinking. My
mother, watching the naturalistic and methodic
bent of me, was, I suppose, tranquil in the
thought of my becoming another White of
Selborne, or Vicar of Wakefield, victorious in
Whistonian and every other controversy. My
father perhaps conceived more cometic or
meteoric career for me, but neither of them
put the matter seriously in hand, however
deeply laid up in heart : and I was allowed
without remonstrance to go on measuring the
blue of the sky, and watching the flight of the
clouds, till I had forgotten most of the Latin
I ever knew, and all the Greek, except
Anacreon's ode to the rose.
2 72 PRiETERITA.
205. Some little effort was made to pull me
together in 1836 by sending me to hear Mr.
Dale's lectures at King's College, where I
explained to Mr. Dale, on meeting him one
day in the court of entrance, that porticoes
should not be carried on the top of arches ;
and considered myself exalted because I went
in at the same door with boys who had square
caps on. The lectures were on early English
literature, of which, though I had never read
a word of any before Pope, I thought myself
already a much better judge than Mr. Dale.
His quotation of " Knut the king came sailing
by " stayed with me ; and I think that was
about all I learnt during the summer. For,
as my adverse stars would have it, that year,
my father's partner, Mr. Domecq, thought it
might for once be expedient that he should
himself pay a complimentary round of visits to
his British customers, and asked if meanwhile
he might leave his daughters at Heme Hill to
see the lions at the Tower, and so on. How
we got them all into Heme Hill corners and
cupboards would be inexplicable but with a
plan of the three stories ! The arrangements
were half Noah's ark, half Doll's house, but
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 273
we got them all in : Clotilde, a graceful oval-
faced blonde of fifteen ; Cecile, a dark, finely-
browed, beautifully-featured girl of thirteen;
Elise, again fair, round-faced like an English
girl, a treasure of good nature and good sense ;
Caroline, a delicately quaint little thing of
eleven. They had all been born abroad,
Clotilde at Cadiz, and of course convent-bred ;
but lately accustomed to be much in society
during vacation at Paris. Deeper than any
one dreamed, the sight of them in the Champs
Elysees had sealed itself in me, for they were
the first well-bred and well-dressed girls I
had ever seen — or at least spoken to. I
mean of course, by well-dressed, perfectly
simply dressed, with Parisian cutting and
fitting. They were all "bigoted" — as Pro-
testants would say ; quietly firm, as they ought
to say — Roman Catholics; spoke Spanish
and French with perfect grace, and English
with broken precision : were all fairly sensible,
Clotilde sternly and accurately so, Elise gaily
and kindly, Cecile serenely, Caroline keenly.
A most curious galaxy, or southern cross, of
unconceived stars, floating on a sudden into
my obscure firmament of London suburb.
vol. 1. c
2 74 ' PR^TERITA.
206. How my parents could allow their
young novice to be cast into the fiery furnace
of the outer world in this helpless manner the
reader may wonder, and only the Fates know ;
but there was this excuse for them, that they
had never seen me the least interested or
anxious about girls — never caring to stay in
the promenades at Cheltenham or Bath, or
on the parade at Dover; on the contrary,
growling and mewing if I was ever kept there,
and off to the sea or the fields the moment
I got leave ; and they had educated me in
such extremely orthodox English Toryism and
Evangelicalism that they could not conceive
their scientific, religious, and George the
Third revering youth, wavering in his con-
stitutional balance towards French Catholics.
And I had never said anything about the
Champs Elysees ! Virtually convent -bred
more closely than the maids themselves, with-
out a single sisterly or cousinly affection for
refuge or lightning rod, and having no athletic
skill or pleasure to check my dreaming, I was
thrown, bound hand and foot, in my unaccom-
plished simplicity, into the fiery furnace, or
fiery cross, of these four girls, — who of course
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 275
reduced me to a mere heap of white ashes in
four days. Four days, at the most, it took
to reduce me to ashes, but the Mercredi des
cendres lasted four years.
Anything more comic in the externals of it,
anything more tragic in the essence, could not
have been invented by the skilfullest designer
in either kind. In my social behaviour and
mind I was a curious combination of Mr.
Traddles, Mr. Toots, and Mr. Winkle. I had
the real fidelity and single-mindedness of Mr.
Traddles, with the conversational abilities of
Mr. Toots, and the heroic ambition of Mr.
Winkle ; — all these illuminated by imagination
like Mr. Copperfield's, at his first Norwood
dinner.
207. Clotilde (Adele Clotilde in full, but her
sisters called her Clotilde, after the queen-
saint, and I Adele, because it rhymed to shell,
spell, and knell) was only made more resplen-
dent by the circlet of her sisters' beauty;
while my own shyness and unpresentableness
were farther stiffened, or rather sanded, by a
patriotic and Protestant conceit, which was
tempered neither by politeness nor sympathy ;
so that, while in company I sate jealously
276 PR.ETERITA.
miserable like a stock fish (in truth, I imagine,
looking like nothing so much as a skate in an
aquarium trying to get up the glass), on any
blessed occasion of tete-a-tete I endeavoured
to entertain my Spanish-born, Paris-bred, and
Catholic-hearted mistress with my own views
upon the subjects of the Spanish Armada,
the Battle of Waterloo, and the doctrine of
Transubstantiation.
To these modes of recommending myself,
however, I did not fail to add what display
I could make of the talents I supposed myself
to possess. I wrote with great pains, and
straining of my invention, a story about
Naples (which I had never seen), and 'the
Bandit Leoni,' whom I represented as typical
of what my own sanguinary and adventurous
disposition would have been had I been
brought up a bandit; and 'the Maiden Giu-
letta,' in whom I portrayed all the perfections
of my mistress. Our connection with Messrs.
Smith & Elder enabled me to get this story
printed in 'Friendship's Offering;' and Adele
laughed over it in rippling ecstasies of de-
rision, of which I bore the pain bravely, for
the sake of seeing her thoroughly amused.
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 277
I dared not address any sonnets straight to
herself; but when she went back to Paris,
wrote her a French letter seven quarto pages
long, descriptive of the desolations and soli-
tudes of Heme Hill since her departure. This
letter, either Elise or Caroline wrote to tell me
she had really read, and ' laughed immensely
at the French of.' Both Caroline and Elise
pitied me a little, and did not like to say she
had also laughed at the contents.
208. The old people, meanwhile, saw little
harm in all this. Mr. Domecq, who was ex-
tremely good-natured, and a good judge of
character, rather liked me, because he saw
that I was good-natured also, and had some
seedling brains, which would come up in time :
in the interests of the business he was per-
fectly ready to give me any of his daughters
I liked, who could also be got to like me, but
considered that the time was not come to talk
of such things. My father was entirely of the
same mind, besides being pleased at my getting
a story printed in 'Friendship's Offering,'
glad that I saw something of girls with good
manners, and in hopes that if I wrote poetry
about them, it might be as good as the Hours
278 PRjETERITA.
of Idleness. My mother, who looked upon
the idea of my marrying a Roman Catholic as
too monstrous to be possible in the decrees
of Heaven, and too preposterous to be even
guarded against on earth, was rather annoyed
at the whole business, as she would have been
if one of her chimneys had begun smoking, —
but had not the slightest notion her house was
on fire. She saw more, however, than my
father, into the depth of the feeling, but did
not, in her motherly tenderness, like to grieve
me by any serious check to it. She hoped,
when the Domecqs went back to Paris, we
might see no more of them, and that Adele's
influence and memory would pass away — with
next winter's snow.
209. Under these indulgent circumstances,
— bitterly ashamed of the figure I had made,
but yet not a whit dashed back out of my
daily swelling foam of furious conceit, sup-
ported as it was by real depth of feeling, and
(note it well, good reader) by a true and
glorious sense of the newly revealed miracle
of human love, in its exaltation of the physical
beauty of the world I had till then sought by
its own light alone, — I set myself in that my
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 279
seventeenth year, in a state of majestic imbe-
cility, to write a tragedy on a Venetian sub-
ject, in which the sorrows of my soul were
to be enshrined in immortal verse, — the fair
heroine, Bianca, was to be endowed with the
perfections of Desdemona and the brightness
of Juliet, — and Venice and Love were to be
described, as never had been thought of
before. I may note in passing, that on my
first sight of the Ducal Palace, the year before,
I had deliberately announced to my father and
mother, and — it seemed to me stupidly in-
credulous — Mary, that I meant to make such
a drawing of the Ducal Palace as never had
been made before. This I proceeded to per-
form by collecting some hasty memoranda on
the spot, and finishing my design elaborately
out of my head at Treviso. The drawing
still exists, — for a wonder, out of perspective,
which I had now got too conceited to follow
the rules of, — and with the diaper pattern of
the red and white marbles represented as
a bold panelling in relief. No figure dis-
turbs the solemn tranquillity of the Riva,
and the gondolas — each in the shape of a
Turkish crescent standing on its back on
2 8o PR.ETERITA.
the water — float about without the aid of
gondoliers.
I remember nothing more of that year,
1836, than sitting under the mulberry tree
in the back garden, writing my tragedy. I
forget whether we went travelling or not, or
what I did in the rest of the day. It is
all now blank to me, except Venice, Bianca,
and looking out over Shooter's Hill, where
I could see the last turn of the road to
Paris.
Some Greek, though I don't know what,
must have been read, and some mathematics,
for I certainly knew the difference between
a square and cube root when I went to
Oxford, and was put by my tutor into Hero-
dotus, out of whom I immediately gathered
materials enough to write my Scythian drink-
ing song, in imitation of the Giaour.
210. The reflective reader can scarcely but
have begun to doubt, by this time, the ac-
curacy of my statement that I took no harm
from Byron. But he need not. The parti-
cular form of expression which my folly took
was indeed directed by him ; but this form
was the best it could have taken. I got better
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 28 I
practice in English by imitating the Giaour
and Bride of Abydos than I could have had
under any other master, (the tragedy was of
course Shakespearian !) and the state of my
mind was — my mind's own fault, and that of
surrounding mischance or mismanagement —
not Byron's. In that same year, 1836, I took
to reading Shelley also, and wasted much time
over the Sensitive Plant and Epipsychidion ;
and I took a good deal of harm from him, in
trying to write lines like ' prickly and pulpous
and blistered and blue ; ' or 'it was a little
lawny islet by anemone and vi'let, — like
mosaic paven,' etc. ; but in the state of frothy
fever I was in, there was little good for me to
be got out of anything. The perseverance
with which I tried to wade through the Revolt
of Islam, and find out (I never did, and don't
know to this day) who revolted against whom,
or what, was creditable to me ; and the
Prometheus really made me understand some-
thing of iEschylus. I am not sure that, for
what I was to turn out, my days of ferment
could have been got over much easier : at
any rate, it was better than if I had been
learning to shoot, or hunt, or smoke, or
2 82 PRJETERITA.
gamble. The entirely inscrutable thing to
me, looking back on myself, is my total want
of all reason, will, or design in the business :
I had neither the resolution to win Adele,
the courage to do without her, the sense to
consider what was at last to come of it all, or
the grace to think how disagreeable I was
making myself at the time to everybody about
me. There was really no more capacity nor
intelligence in me than in a just fledged owlet,
or just open-eyed puppy, disconsolate at the
existence of the moon.
21 1. Out of my feebly melodious complaints
to that luminary, however, I was startled by
a letter to my father from Christ Church, ad-
vising him that there was room for my resi-
dence in the January term of 1837, and that I
must come up to matriculate in October of
the instant year, 1836.
Strangely enough, my father had never
enquired into the nature and manner of ma-
triculation, till he took me up to display in
Oxford ; — he, very nearly as much a boy as
I, for anything we knew of what we were
about. He never had any doubt about
putting me at the most fashionable college,
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 283
and of course my name had been down at
Christ Church years before I was called up;
but it had never dawned on my father's mind
that there were two, fashionable and unfash-
ionable, orders, or castes, of undergraduate
at Christ Church, one of these being called
Gentlemen-Commoners, the other Commoners;
and that these last seemed to occupy an
almost bisectional point between the Gentle-
men-Commoners and the Servitors. All these
' invidious ' distinctions are now done away
with in our Reformed University. Nobody
sets up for the special rank of a gentleman,
but nobody will be set down as a commoner;
and though, of the old people, anybody will
beg or canvass for a place for their children
in a charity school, everybody would be
furious at the thought of his son's wearing,
at college, the gown of a Servitor.
212. How far I agree with the modern
British citizen in these lofty sentiments, my
general writings have enough shown; but I
leave the reader to form his own opinions
without any contrary comment of mine, on the
results of the exploded system of things in
my own college life.
284
PRjETERITA.
My father did not like the word ' commoner,'
— all the less, because our relationships in-
general were not uncommon. Also, though
himself satisfying his pride enough in being
the head of the sherry trade, he felt and saw
in his son powers which had not their full
scope in the sherry trade. His ideal of my
future, — now entirely formed in conviction of
my genius, — was that I should enter at college
into the best society, take all the prizes every
year, and a double first to finish with ; marry
Lady Clara Vere de Vere ; write poetry as
good as Byron's, only pious ; preach sermons
as good as Bossuet's, only Protestant ; be
made, at forty, Bishop of Winchester, and at
fifty, Primate of England.
213. With all these hopes, and under all
these temptations, my father was yet restrained
and embarrassed in no small degree by his
old and steady sense of what was becoming to
his station in life : and he consulted anxiously,
but honestly, the Dean of Christ Church,
(Gaisford,) and my college tutor that was to
be, Mr. Walter Brown, whether a person in
his position might without impropriety enter
his son as a gentleman-commoner. I did not
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 285
hear the dialogues, but the old Dean must have
answered with a grunt, that my father had
every right to make me a gentleman-commoner
if he liked, and could pay the fees ; the tutor,
more attentively laying before him the con-
ditions of the question, may perhaps have said,
with courtesy, that it would be good for the
college to have a reading man among the
gentlemen-commoners, who, as a rule, were
not studiously inclined ; but he was compelled
also to give my father a hint, that as far as my
reading had already gone, it was not altogether
certain I could pass the entrance examination
which had to be sustained by commoners.
This last suggestion was conclusive. It was
not to be endured that the boy who had been
expected to carry all before him, should get
himself jammed in the first turnstile. I was
entered as a Gentleman-Commoner without
farther debate, and remember still, as if it were
yesterday, the pride of first walking out of
the Angel Hotel, and past University College,
holding my father's arm, in my velvet cap and
silk gown.
214. Yes, good reader, the velvet and silk
made a difference, not to my mother only, but
286 PR.ETERITA.
to me ! Quite one of the telling and weighty
points in the home debates concerning this
choice of Hercules, had been that the com-
moner's gown was not only of ugly stuff, but
had no flowing lines in it, and was virtually
only a black rag tied to one's shoulders. One
was thrice a gownsman in a flowing gown.
So little, indeed, am I disposed now in
maturer years to deride these unphilosophical
feelings, that instead of effacing distinction
of dress at the University (except for the
boating clubs), I would fain have seen them
extended into the entire social order of the
country. I think that nobody but duchesses
should be allowed to wear diamonds ; that
lords should be known from common people
by their stars, a quarter of a mile off; that
every peasant girl should boast her county by
some dainty ratification of cap or bodice ; and
that in the towns a vintner should be known
from a fishmonger by the cut of his jerkin.
That walk to the Schools, and the waiting,
outside the Divinity School, in comforting
admiration of its door, my turn for matricula-
tion, continue still for me, at pleasure. But
I remember nothing more that year ; nor
X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE. 287
anything of the first days of the next, until
early in January we drove down to Oxford,
only my mother and I, by the beautiful Henley
road, weary a little as we changed horses for
the last stage from Dorchester ; solemnized,
in spite of velvet and silk, as we entered
among the towers in the twilight ; and after
one more rest under the domestic roof of the
Angel, I found myself the next day at evening,
alone, by the fireside, entered into command
of my own life, in my own college room in
Peckwater.
CHAPTER XI.
CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR.
215. ALONE, by the fireside of the little
back room, which looked into the narrow lane,
chiefly then of stabling, I sate collecting my
resolution for college life.
I had not much to collect ; nor, so far as I
knew, much to collect it against. I had about
as clear understanding of my whereabouts, or
foresight of my fortune, as Davie Gellatly
might have had in my place ; with these
farther inferiorities to Davie, that I could
neither dance, sing, nor roast eggs. There
was not the slightest fear of my gambling, for
I had never touched a card, and looked upon
dice as people now do on dynamite. No fear
of my being tempted by the strange woman,
for was not I in love ? and besides, never
allowed to be out after half-past nine. No
fear of my running in debt, for there were no
Turners to be had in Oxford, and I cared for
288
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 289
nothing else in the world of material pos-
session. No fear of my breaking my neck out
hunting, for I couldn't have ridden a hack
down the High Street ; and no fear of my
ruining myself at a race, for I never had been
but at one race in my life, and had not the
least wish to win anybody else's money.
I expected some ridicule, indeed, for these
my simple ways, but was safe against ridicule
in my conceit : the only thing I doubted my-
self in, and very rightly, was the power of
applying for three years to work in which I
took not the slightest interest. I resolved,
however, to do my parents and myself as
much credit as I could, said my prayers very
seriously, and went to bed in good hope.
216. And here I must stay, for a minute
or two, to give some account of the state of
mind I had got into during the above-
described progress of my education, touching
religious matters.
As far as I recollect, the steady Bible
reading with my mother ended with our first
continental journey, when I was fourteen ; one
could not read three chapters after breakfast
while the horses were at the door. For this
vol. 1. t
290
PR^F.TERITA.
lesson was substituted my own private read-
ing of a chapter, morning and evening, and,
of course, saying the Lord's Prayer after it,
and asking for everything that was nice for
myself and my family ; after which I waked
or slept, without much thought of anything
but my earthly affairs, whether by night or
day.
It had never entered into my head to doubt
a word of the Bible, though I saw well enough
already that its words were to be understood
otherwise than I had been taught ; but the
more I believed it, the less it did me any
good. It was all very well for Abraham to
do what angels bid him, — so would I, if any
angels bid me ; but none had ever appeared
to me that I knew of, not even Adele, who
couldn't be an angel because she was a
Roman Catholic.
^ 217. Also, if I had lived in Christ's time,
of course I would have gone with Him up to
the mountain, or sailed with Him on the Lake
of Galilee; but that was quite another thing
from going to Beresford chapel, Walworth,
or St. Bride's, Fleet Street. Also, though
I felt mvself somehow called to imitate
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 29 I
Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress, I couldn't
see that either Billiter Street and the Tower
Wharf, where my father had his cellars, or
the cherry-blossomed garden at Heme Hill,
where my mother potted her flowers, could
be places 1 was bound to fly from as in the
City of Destruction. Without much reason-
ing on the matter, I had virtually concluded
from my general Bible reading that, never
having meant or done any harm that I knew
of, I could not be in danger of hell : while I
saw also that even the creme de la creme of
religious people seemed to be in no hurry to
go to heaven. On the whole, it seemed to
me, all that was required of me was to say
my prayers, go to church, learn my lessons,
obey my parents, and enjoy my dinner.
218. Thus minded, in the slowly granted
light of the winter morning I looked out upon
the view from my college windows, of Christ
Church library and the smooth-gravelled
square of Peckwater, vexed a little because
I was not in an oriel window looking out on ■•
a Gothic chapel : but quite unconscious of the
real condemnation I had fallen under, or of
the loss that was involved to me in having
292
PRiETERITA.
nothing but Christ Church library, and a
gravelled square, to see out of window during
the spring-times of two years of youth.
At the moment I felt that, though dull, it
was all very grand ; and that the architecture,
though Renaissance, was bold, learned, well-
proportioned, and variously didactic. In
reality, I might just as well have been sent
to the dungeon of Chillon, except for the
damp ; better, indeed, if I could have seen
the three small trees from the window slit,
and good groining and pavement, instead of
the modern vulgar upholstery of my room
furniture.
Even the first sight of college chapel
disappointed me, after the large churches
abroad ; but its narrow vaults had very dif-
ferent offices.
On the whole, of important places and
services for the Christian souls of England,
the choir of Christ Church was at that epoch
of English history virtually the navel, and
seat of life. There remained in it the tradi-
tions of Saxon, Norman, Elizabethan, religion
unbroken, — the memory of loyalty, the reality
of learning, and, in nominal obedience at least,
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 293
and in the heart of them with true docility,
stood every morning, to be animated for the
highest duties owed to their country, the
noblest of English youth. The greater
number of the peers of England, and, as a
rule, the best of her squirealty, passed neces-
sarily through Christ Church.
The cathedral itself was an epitome of
English history. Every stone, every pane of
glass, every panel of woodwork, was true, and
of its time, — not an accursed sham of archi-
tect's job. The first shrine of St. Frideswide
had indeed been destroyed, and her body rent
and scattered on the dust by the Puritan ; but
her second shrine was still beautiful in its
kind, — most lovely English work both of
heart and hand. The Norman vaults above
were true English Norman ; bad and rude
enough, but the best we could do with our
own wits, and no French help. The roof was
true Tudor, — grotesque, inventively construc-
tive, delicately carved ; it, with the roof of
the hall staircase, summing the builder's skill
of the fifteenth century. The west window,
with its clumsy painting of the Adoration of
the Shepherds, a monument of the transition
**.->
294
PR^TERITA.
from window to picture which ended in Dutch
pictures of the cattle without either shepherds
or Christ, — but still, the best men could do of
the day ; and the plain final woodwork of the
stalls represented still the last art of living
England in the form of honest and comfort-
able carpentry.
219. In this choir, written so closely and
consecutively with indisputable British history,
met every morning a congregation represent-
ing the best of what Britain had become, —
orderly, as the crew of a man-of-war, in the
goodly ship of their temple. Every man in
his place, according to his rank, age, and
learning; every man of sense or heart there
recognizing that he was either fulfilling, or
being prepared to fulfil, the gravest duties
required of Englishmen. A well-educated
foreigner, admitted to that morning service,
might have learned and judged more quickly
and justly what the country had been, and
still had power to be, than by months of stay
in court or city. There, in his stall, sat the
greatest divine of England, — under his com-
mandant niche, her greatest scholar, — among
the tutors the present Dean Liddell, and a
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 295
man of curious intellectual power and simple
virtue, Osborne Gordon. The group of noble-
men gave, in the Marquis of Kildare, Earl of
Desart, Earl of Emlyn, and Francis Charteris,
now Lord Wemyss, — the brightest types of
high race and active power. Henry Acland
and Charles Newton among the senior under-
graduates, and I among the freshmen, showed,
if one had known it, elements of curious
possibilities in coming days. None of us
then conscious of any need or chance of
change, least of all the stern captain, who,
with rounded brow and glittering dark eye,
led in his old thunderous Latin the responses
of the morning prayer.
For all that I saw, and was made to think,
in that cathedral choir, I am most thankful
to this day.
220. The influence on me of the next good-
liest part of the college buildings, — the hall,
— was of a different and curiously mixed
character. Had it only been used, as it only
ought to have been, for festivity and magnifi-
cence, — for the refectory daily, the reception
of guests, the delivery of speeches on state
occasions, and the like, — the hall, like the
296 pra;terita.
cathedral, would have had an entirely salutary
and beneficently solemnizing effect on me,
hallowing to me my daily bread, or, if our
Dean Abbot had condescended sometimes to
dine with us, our incidental venison. But
with the extremely bad taste (which, to my
mind, is our cardinal modern sin, the staple
to the hinge of our taste for money, and
distaste for money's worth, and every other
worthiness) — in that bad taste, I say, the
Abbot allowed our Hall to be used for ' collec-
tions.' The word is wholly abominable to
my mind, whether as expressing extorted
charities in church, or extracted knowledge
in examination. ' Collections,' in scholastic
sense, meant the college examination at the
end of every term, at which the Abbot had
always the worse than bad taste to be present
as our inquisitor, though he had never once
presided at our table as our host. Of course
the collective quantit}' of Greek possessed by
all the undergraduate heads in hall, was to
him, infinitesimal. Scornful at once, and vin-
dictive, thunderous always, more sullen and
threatening as the day went on, he stalked
with baleful emanation of Gorgonian cold
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. ' 297
from dais to door, and door to dais, of the
majestic torture chamber, — vast as the great
council hall of Venice, but degraded now by
the mean terrors, swallow-like under its eaves,
of doleful creatures who had no counsel in
them, except how to hide their crib in time,
at each fateful Abbot's transit. Of course /
never used a crib, but I believe the Dean
would rather I had used fifty, than borne the
puzzled and hopeless aspect which I presented
towards the afternoon, over whatever I had
to do. And as my Latin writing was, I
suppose, the worst in the university, — as I
never by any chance knew a first from a
second future, or, even to the end of my
Oxford career, could get into my head where
the Pelasgi lived, or where the Heraclidae
returned from, — it may be imagined with what
sort of countenance the Dean gave me his
first and second fingers to shake at our part-
ing, Or with what comfort I met the inquiries
of my father and mother as to the extent to
which I was, in college opinion, carrying all
before me.
221. As time went on, the aspect of my
college hall to me meant little more than the
298
PRiETERITA.
.
fear and shame of those examination days',
but even in the first surprise and sublimity
of finding myself dining there, were many
reasons for the qualification of my pleasure.
The change from our front parlour at Heme
Hill, some fifteen feet by eighteen, and meat
and pudding with my mother and Mary, to a
hall about as big as the nave of Canterbury
Cathedral, with its extremity lost in mist, its
roof in darkness, and its company, an in-
numerable, immeasurable vision in vanishing
perspective, was in itself more appalling to me
than appetizing ; but also, from first to last,
I had the clownish feeling of having no busi-
ness there.
In the cathedral, however born or bred, I
felt myself present by as good a right as its
bishop, — nay, that in some of its lessons and
uses, the building was less his than mine.
But at table, with this learned and lordly per-
spective of guests, and state of worldly service,
I had nothing to do ; my own proper style of
dining was for ever, I felt, divided from this —
impassably. With baked potatoes under the
mutton, just out of the oven, into the little
parlour off the shop in Market Street, or
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR, 299
beside a gipsy's kettle on Addington Hill
(not that I had ever been beside a gipsy's
kettle, but often wanted to be) ; or with an
oat-cake and butter — for I was always a
gourmand — in a Scotch shepherd's cottage, to
be divided with his collie, I was myself, and
in my place : but at the gentlemen-com-
moners' table, in Cardinal Wolsey's dining-
room, I was, in all sorts of ways at once, less
than myself, and in all sorts of wrong places
at once, out of my place.
222. I may as well here record a some-
what comic incident, extremely trivial, which
took place a little while afterwards ; and
which, in spite of its triviality, farther con-
tributed to diminish in my own mind the
charm of Christ Church hall. I had been
received as a good-humoured and inoffensive
little cur, contemptuously, yet kindly, among
the dogs of race at the gentlemen-commoners'
table; and my tutor, and the men who read
in class with me, were beginning to recognize
that I had some little gift in reading with
good accent, thinking of what I read, and
even asking troublesome questions about it,
to the extent of being one day eagerly and
300 PRJETERITA.
admiringly congratulated by the whole class
the moment we got out into quad, on the con-
summate manner in which I had floored our
tutor. I having had no more intention to
floor, or consciousness of flooring, the tutor,
than a babe unborn ! but had only happened,
to the exquisite joy of my companions, to ask
him something which he didn't happen to
know. But, a good while before attaining
this degree of public approval, I had made a
direct attempt to bring myself into favourable
notice, which had been far less successful.
It was an institution of the college that
every week the undergraduates should write
an essay on a philosophical subject, expli-
catory of some brief Latin text of Horace,
Juvenal, or other accredited and pithy writer;
and, I suppose, as a sort of guarantee to the
men that what they wrote was really looked
at, the essay pronounced the best was read
aloud in hall on Saturday afternoon, with en-
forced attendance of the other undergraduates.
Here, at least, was something in which I felt
that my little faculties had some scope, and
both conscientiously, and with real interest
in the task, I wrote my weekly essay with all
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 3OI
the sagacity and eloquence I possessed. And
therefore, though much flattered, I was not
surprised, when, a few weeks after coming up,
my tutor announced to me, with a look of
approval, that I was to read my essay in hall
next Saturday.
223. Serenely, and on good grounds, con-
fident in my powers of reading rightly, and
with a decent gravity which I felt to be be-
coming on this my first occasion of public dis-
tinction, I read my essay, I have reason to
believe, not ungracefully ; and descended from
the rostrum to receive — as I doubted not — the
thanks of the gentlemen-commoners for this
creditable presentment of the wisdom of that
body. But poor Clara, after her first ball,
receiving her cousin's compliments in the
cloak-room, was less surprised than I by my
welcome from my cousins of the long-table.
Not in envy, truly, but in fiery disdain, varied
in expression through every form and man-
ner of English language, from the Olympian
sarcasm of Charteris to the level - delivered
volley of Grimston, they explained to me that
I had committed grossest Ihe-majeste against
the order of gentlemen-commoners ; that no
302 PR^ETERITA.
gentleman-commoner's essa}' ought ever to con-
tain more than twelve lines, with four words in
each ; and that even indulging to my tolly, and
conceit, and want of savoir /aire, the impro-
priety of writing an essay with any meaning
in it, like vulgar students, — the thoughtlessness
and audacity of writing one that would take at
least a quarter of an hour to read, and then
reading it all, might for this once be forgiven
to such a greenhorn, but that Coventry wasn't
the word for the place I should be sent to if
ever I did such a thing again. I am happy at
least in remembering that I bore my fall from
the clouds without much hurt, or even too
ridiculous astonishment. I at once admitted
the justice of these representations, yet do not
remember that I modified the style of my future
essays materially in consequence, neither do I
remember what line of conduct I had proposed
to myself in the event of again obtaining the
privilege of edifying the Saturday's congrega-
tion. Perhaps my essays really diminished in
value, or perhaps even the tutors had enough
of them. All I know is, I was never asked to.
224. I ought to have noticed that the first
introductions to the men at my table were
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 3O3
made easier by the chance of my having been
shut up for two clays of storm at the Hospice
of the Grimsel, in 1835, with some thirty
travellers from various countries, among whom
a Christ Church gentleman-commoner, Mr.
Strangways, had played chess with me, and
been a little interested in the way I drew
granite among the snow. He at once ac-
knowledged me in Hall for a fellow-creature ;
and the rest of his set, finding they could get
a good deal out of me in amusement without
my knowing it, and that I did not take upon
myself to reform their manners from any Evan-
gelical, or otherwise impertinent, point of view,
took me up kindly ; so that, in a fortnight or
so, I had fair choice of what companions I
liked, out of the whole college.
Fortunately for me — beyond all words,
fortunately — Henry Acland, by about a year
and a half my senior, chose me; saw what
helpless possibilities were in me, and took me
affectionately in hand. His rooms, next the
gate on the north side of Canterbury, were
within fifty yards of mine, and became to me
the onty place where I was happy. He quietly
showed me the manner of life of English youth
3O4 PR^TERITA.
of good sense, good family, and enlarged edu-
cation ; we both of us already lived in elements
far external to the college quadrangle. He
told me of the plains of Troy ; a year or two
afterwards I showed him, on his marriage
journey, the path up the Montanvert ; and the
friendship between us has never changed, but
by deepening, to this day.
225. Of other friends, I had some sensible
and many kind ones ; an excellent college
tutor ; and later on, for a private one, the en-
tirely right-minded and accomplished scholar
already named, Osborne Gordon. At the
corner of the great quadrangle lived Dr. Buck-
land, always ready to help me, — or, a greater
favour still, to be helped by me, in diagram
drawing for his lectures. My picture of the
granite veins in Trewavas Head, with a cutter
weathering the point in a squall, in the style
of Copley Fielding, still, I believe, forms part
of the resources of the geological department.
Mr. Parker, then first founding the Archi-
tectural Society, and Charles Newton, already
notable in his intense and curious way of
looking into things, were, there to sympathize
with me, and to teach me more accurately
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 305
the study of architecture. Within eight miles
were the pictures of Blenheim. In all ways,
opportunities, and privileges, it was not con-
ceivable that a youth of my age could have
been placed more favourably — if only he
had had the wit to know them, and the will to
use them. Alas ! there I stood — or tottered —
partly irresolute, partly idiotic, in the midst
of them : nothing that I can think of among
men, or birds, or beasts, quite the image of
me, except poor little Shepherdess Agnes's
picture of the ' Duckling Astray.'
226. I count it is just a little to my credit
that I was not ashamed, but pleased, that my
mother came to Oxford with me to take such
care of me as she could. Through all three
years of residence, during term time, she had
lodging in the High Street (first in Mr. Adams's
pretty house of sixteenth century wood-work),
and my father lived alone all through the week
at Heme Hill, parting with wife and son at
once for the son's sake. On the Saturday, he
came down to us, and I went with him and my
mother, in the old domestic way, to St. Peter's,
for the Sunday morning service : otherwise,
they never appeared with me in public, lest
vol. 1. U
306 PRETERIT A.
my companions should laugh at me, or any
one else ask malicious questions concerning
vintner papa and his old-fashioned wife.
None of the men, through my whole college
career, ever said one word in depreciation of
either of them, or in sarcasm at my habitually
spending my evenings with my mother. But
once, when Adele's elder sister came with her
husband to see Oxford, and I mentioned,
somewhat unnecessarily, at dinner, that she
was the Countess Diane de Maison, they had
no mercy on me for a month afterwards.
The reader will please also note that my
mother did not come to Oxford because she
could not part with me, — still less, because
she distrusted me. She came simply that
she might be at hand in case of accident
or sudden illness. She had always been my
physician as well as my nurse ; on several
occasions her timely watchfulness had saved
me from the most serious danger ; nor was her
caution now, as will be seen, unjustified by the
event. But for the first two years of my college
life I caused her no anxiety ; and my day was
always happier because I could tell her at tea
whatever had pleased or profited me in it.
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 307
227. The routine of day is perhaps worth
telling. I never missed chapel ; and in winter
got an hour's reading before it. Breakfast at
nine, — half-an-hour allowed for it to a second,
for Captain Marryat with my roll and butter.
College lectures till one. Lunch, with a little
talk to anybody who cared to come in, or
share their own commons with me. At two,
Buckland or other professor's lecture. Walk
till five, hall dinner, wine either given or
accepted, and quiet chat over it with the
reading men, or a frolic with those of my own
table; but I always got round to the High
Street to my mother's tea at seven, and
amused myself till Tom * rang in, and I got
with a run to Canterbury gate, and settled to
a steady bit of final reading till ten. I can't
make out more than six hours' real work in
the day, but that was constantly and unflinch-
ingly given.
228. My Herodotean history, at an}' rate,
got well settled down into me, and remains a
greatly precious possession to this day. Also
* I try to do without notes, but for the sake of any not
English reader must explain that ' Tom ' is the name of the
great bell of Oxford, in Christ Church western tower.
3O8 PRiETERITA.
my college tutor, Mr. Walter Brown, became
somewhat loved by me, and with gentleness
encouraged me into some small acquaintance
with Greek verbs. My mathematics pro-
gressed well under another tutor whom I
liked, Mr. Hill; the natural instinct in me for
pure geometry being keen, and my grasp of it,
as far as I had gone, thorough. At my '■ little
go' in the spring of '38, the diagrams of
Euclid being given me, as was customary with
the Euclid examination paper, I handed the
book back to the examiner, saying scornfully,
' I don't want any figures, Sir.' ' You had
better take them,' replied he, mildly; which
I did, as he bid me ; but I could then, and
can still, dictate blindfold the demonstration
of any problem, with any letters, at any of its
points. I just scraped through, and no more,
with my Latin writing, came creditably off
with what else had to be done, and my tutor
was satisfied with me, — not enough recog-
nizing that the 'little go' had asked, and got
out of me, pretty nearly all I had in me, or
was ever likely to have in that kind.
229. It was extremely unfortunate for me
that the two higher lecturers of the college,
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 309
Kynaston (afterwards Master of St. Paul's)
in Greek, and Hussey, the censor, in I don't
recollect what of disagreeable, were both to
my own feeling repellent. They both de-
spised me, as a home-boy, to begin with ;
Kynaston with justice, for I had not Greek
enough to understand anything he said ; and
when good-naturedly one day, in order to
bring out as best he might my supposed
peculiar genius and acquirements, he put me
on at the Opa Be yei'ao) rpi<y\i>(pa)i>, oiroi icevov
8ifia<; Kadelvai, of the Iphigenia in Tauris, and
found, to his own and all the class's astonish-
ment and disgust, that I did not know what a
triglyph was, — never spoke to me with any
patience again, until long afterwards at St.
Paul's, where he received me, on an occasion
of school ceremony, with affection and respect.
Hussey was, by all except the best men of
the college, felt to be a censorious censor;
and the manners of the college were un-
happily such as to make any wise censor
censorious. He had, by the judgment of
heaven, a grim countenance ; and was to me
accordingly, from first to last, as a Christ-
church Gorgon or Erinnys, whose passing
3 I O PRjETERITA.
cast a shadow on the air as well as on the
gravel.
I am amused, as I look back, in now per-
ceiving what an aesthetic view I had of all my
tutors and companions, — how consistently
they took to me the aspect of pictures, and
how I from the first declined giving any atten-
tion to those which were not well painted
enough. My ideal of a tutor was founded on
what Holbein or Durer had represented in
Erasmus or Melanchthon, or, even more
solemnly, on Titian's Magnificoes or Boni-
fazio's Bishops. No presences of that kind
appeared either in Tom or Peckwater; and
even Doctor Pusey (who also never spoke to
me) was not in the least a picturesque or
tremendous figure, but only a sickly and
rather ill put together English clerical
gentleman, who never looked one in the
face, or appeared aware of the state of the
weather.
230. My own tutor was a dark-eyed, ani-
mated, pleasant, but not in the least impressive
person, who walked with an unconscious air
of assumption, noticeable by us juniors not to
his advantage. Kynaston was ludicrously like
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 3 I I
a fat schoolboy, llussey, grim and brown
as I said, somewhat lank, incapable of jest,
equally incapable of enthusiasm ; for the rest,
doing his duty thoroughly, and a most esti-
mable member of the college and university, —
but to me, a resident calamity far greater than
1 knew, whose malefic influence I recognize in*-
memory only.
Finally, the Dean himself, though venerable
to me, from the first, in his evident honesty,
self-respect, and real power of a rough kind,
was yet in his general aspect too much like
the sign of the Red Pig which I afterwards
saw set up in pudding raisins, with black
currants for eyes, by an imaginative grocer
in Chartres fair; and in the total bodily and
ghostly presence of him was to me only a
rotundly progressive terror, or sternly en-
throned and niched Anathema.
There was one tutor, however, out of my
sphere, who reached my ideal, but disappointed
my hope, then, — as perhaps his own, since ; —
a man sorrowfully under the dominion of the
Greek avdyicr) — the present Dean. He was,
and is, one of the rarest types of nobly-
presenced Englishmen, but I fancy it was his
312
PRyETERITA.
adverse star that made him an Englishman at
all — the prosaic and practical element in him
having prevailed over the sensitive one. He
was the only man in Oxford among the
masters of my day who knew anything of art ;
and his keen saying of Turner, that he ' had
got hold of a false ideal/ would have been
infinitely helpful to me at that time, had he
explained and enforced it. But I suppose he
did not see enough in me to make him take
trouble with me, — and, what was much more
serious, he saw not enough in himself to take
trouble, in that field, with himself.
231. There was a more humane and more
living spirit, however, inhabitant of the north-
west angle of the Cardinal's Square : and a
great many of the mischances which were
only harmful to me through my own folly may
be justly held, and to the full, counterbalanced
by that one piece of good fortune, of which I
had the wit to take advantage. Dr. Buckland
was a Canon of the Cathedral, and he, with
his wife and family, were all sensible and
good-natured, with originality enough in the
sense of them to give sap and savour to the
whole college.
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 3 I 3
Originality — passing slightly into grotesque-
ness, and a little diminishing their effective
power. The Doctor had too much humour
ever to follow far enough the dull side of a
subject. Frank was too fond of his bear cub
to give attention enough to the training of the
cubbish element in himself; and a day scarcely
passed without Mit's com-mit-ting herself in
some manner disapproved by the statelier
college demoiselles. But all were frank, kind,
and clever, vital in the highest degree ; to me,
medicinal and saving.
Dr. Buckland was extremely like Sydney
Smith in his staple of character ; no rival with
him in wit, but like him in humour, common
sense, and benevolently cheerful doctrine of
Divinity. At his breakfast-table I met the
leading scientific men of the day, from Herschel
downwards, and often intelligent and courteous
foreigners, — with whom my stutter of French,
refined by Adele into some precision of accent,
was sometimes useful. Every one was at
ease and amused at that breakfast-table, — the
menu and service of it usually in themselves
interesting. I have always regretted a day of
unlucky engagement on which I missed a
3 I 4 PR.ETERITA.
delicate toast of mice ; and remembered, with
delight, being waited upon one hot summer
morning by two graceful and polite little Caro-
lina lizards, who kept off the flies.
232. I have above noticed the farther and
incalculable good it was to me that Acland
took me up in my first and foolishest days,
and with pretty irony and loving insight, — or,
rather, sympathy with what was best, and
blindness to what was worst in me, — gave me
the good of seeing a noble young English
life in its purity, sagacity, honour, reckless
daring, and happy piety ; its English pride
shining prettily through all, like a girl's in
her beauty. It is extremely interesting to
me to contrast the Englishman's silently con-
scious pride in what he is, with the vexed rest-
lessness and wretchedness of the Frenchman,
in his thirst for ' gloire,' to be gained by agon-
ized effort to become something he is not.
One day when the Cherwell was running
deep over one of its most slippery weirs,
question arising between Acland and me
whether it were traversable, and I declaring
it too positively to be impassable, Acland
instantly took off boot and sock, and walked
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 3 1 5
over and back. He ran no risk but of a sound
ducking, being, of course, a strong swimmer :
and I suppose him wise enough not to have
done it had there been real danger. But he
would certainly have run the margin fine, and
possessed in its quite highest, and in a certain
sense, most laughable degree, the constitu-
tional English serenity in danger, which, with
the foolish of us, degenerates into delight in
it, but with the wise, whether soldier or
physician, is the basis of the most fortunate
action and swiftest decision of deliberate skill.
When, thirty years afterwards, Dr. Acland
was wrecked in the steamer Tyne, off the
coast of Dorset, the steamer having lain
wedged on the rocks all night, — no one knew
what rocks, — and the dawn breaking on half-
a-mile of dangerous surf between the ship and
shore, — the officers, in anxious debate, the
crew, in confusion, the passengers, in hysterics
or at prayers, were all astonished, and many
scandalized, at the appearance of Dr. Acland
from the saloon in punctilious morning dress,
with the announcement that ' breakfast was
ready.' To the impatient clamour of indigna-
tion with which his unsympathetic conduct
3 1 6 pr,£terita.
was greeted, he replied by pointing out that
not a boat could go on shore, far less come
out from it, in that state of the tide, and that
in the meantime, as most of them were wet,
all cold, and at the best must be dragged
ashore through the surf, if not swim for their
lives in it, they would be extremely prudent
to begin the day, as usual, with breakfast.
The hysterics ceased, the confusion calmed,
what wits anybody had became available to
them again, and not a life was ultimately
lost.
233. In all this playful and proud heroism
of his youth, Henry Acland delighted me as
a leopard or a falcon would, without in the
least affecting my own character by his
example. I had been too often adjured and
commanded to take care of myself, ever to
think of following him over slippery weirs, or
accompanying him in pilot boats through
white-topped shoal water ; but both in art and
science he could pull me on, being years ahead
of me, yet glad of my sympathy, for, till I
came, he was literally alone in the university
in caring for either. To Dr. Buckland, geology
was only the pleasant occupation of his own
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. ^IJ
merry life. To Henry Acland physiology
was an entrusted gospel of which he was the
solitary and first preacher to the heathen ; and
already in his undergraduate's room in Canter-
bury he was designing — a few years later in
his professional room in Tom quad, he was
realizing, — the introduction of physiological
study which has made the university what she
has now become.
Indeed, the curious point in Acland's char-
acter was its early completeness. Already in
these yet boyish days, his judgment was
unerring, his aims determined, his powers
developed ; and had he not, as time went
on, been bound to the routine of professional
work, and satisfied in the serenity, not to
say arrested by the interests, of a beautiful
home life, it is no use thinking or saying
what he might have been ; those who know
him best are the most thankful that he is
what he is.
234. Next to Acland, but with a many-feet-
thick wall between, in my aesthetic choice of
idols, which required primarily of man or
woman that they should be comely, before I
regarded any of their farther qualities, came
3 I 8 PR^ETERITA.
Francis Charteris. I have always held
Charteris the most ideal Scotsman, and on
the whole the grandest type of European
Circassian race hitherto visible to me ; and
his subtle, effortless, inevitable, unmalicious
sarcasm, and generally sufficient and available
sense, gave a constantly natural, and therefore
inoffensive, hauteur to his delicate beauty. He
could do what he liked with anyone, — at least
with anyone of good humour and sympathy ;
and when one day, the old sub-dean coming
out of Canterbury gate at the instant Charteris
was dismounting at it in forbidden pink, and
Charteris turned serenely to him, as he took
his foot out of the stirrup, to inform him that
1 he had been out with the Dean's hounds,'
the old man and the boy were both alike
pleased.
Charteris never failed in anything, but never
troubled himself about anything. Naturally
of high ability and activity, he did all he chose
with ease, — neither had falls in hunting, nor
toil in reading, nor ambition nor anxiety in
examination, — nor disgrace in recklessness of
life. He was partly checked, it may be in
some measure weakened, by hectic danger in
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 3I9
his constitution, possibly the real cause of his
never having made his mark in after life.
235. The Earl of Desart, next to Charteris,
interested me most of the men at my table.
A youth of the same bright promise, and of
kind disposition, he had less natural activity,
and less — being Irish, — common sense, than
the Scot ; and the University made no attempt
to give him more. It has been the pride of
recent days to equalize the position, and dis-
guise the distinction of noble and servitor.
Perhaps it might have been wiser, instead of
effacing the distinction, to reverse the manner
of it. In those days the happy servitor's
tenure of his college-room and revenue de-
pended on his industry, while it was the
privilege of the noble to support with lavish
gifts the college, from which he expected no
return, and to buy with sums equivalent to
his dignity the privileges of rejecting alike its
instruction and its control. It seems to me
singular, and little suggestive of sagacity in
the common English character, that it had
never occurred to either an old dean, or a
young duke, that possibly the Church of
England and the House of Peers might hold
320 PR^TERITA.
a different position in the country in years to
come if the entrance examination had been
made severer for the rich than the poor ; and
the nobility and good breeding of a student
expected to be blazoned consistently by the
shield on his seal, the tassel on his cap, the
grace of his conduct, and the accuracy of his
learning.
In the last respect, indeed, Eton and Harrow-
boys are for ever distinguished, — whether idle
or industrious in after life, — from youth of
general England ; but how much of the best
capacity of her noblesse is lost by her care-
lessness of their university training, she may
soon have more serious cause to calculate than
I am willing to foretell.
I have little to record of my admired Irish
fellow-student than that he gave the supper
at which my freshman's initiation into the
body of gentlemen-commoners was to be duly
and formally ratified. Curious glances were
directed to me under the ordeal of the neces-
sary toasts, — but it had not occurred to the
hospitality of my entertainers that I probably
knew as much about wine as they did. When
we broke up at the small hours, I helped to
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 32 1
carry the son of the head of my college down-
stairs, and walked across Peckwater to my
own rooms, deliberating, as I went, whether
there was any immediately practicable trigono-
metric method of determining whether I was
walking straight towards the lamp over the
door.
236. From this time — that is to say, from
about the third week after I came into resi-
dence — it began to be recognized that, muff or
milksop though I might be, I could hold my
own on occasion ; and in next term, when I
had to return civilities, that I gave good wine,
and that of curious quality, without any bush ;
and saw with good-humour the fruit I had
sent for from London thrown out of the
window to the porter's children : farther, that
I could take any quantity of jests, though I
could not make one, and could be extremely
interested in hearing conversation on topics
I knew nothing about, — to that degree that
Bob Grimston condescended to take me with
him one day to a tavern across Magdalen
Bridge, to hear him elucidate from the land-
lord some points of the horses entered for
the Derby, an object only to be properly
vol. 1. X
322 PR^TERITA.
accomplished by sitting with indifference on a
corner of the kitchen table, and carrying on
the dialogue with careful pauses, and more
by winks than words.
The quieter men of the set were also some
of them interested in my drawing ; and one
or two — Scott Murray, for instance, and Lord
Kildare — were as punctual as I in chapel, and
had some thoughts concerning college life and
its issues, which they were glad to share with
me. In this second year of residence, my
position in college was thus alike pleasant, and
satisfactorily to my parents, eminent : and I
was received without demur into the Christ-
Church society, which had its quiet club-room
at the corner of Oriel Lane, looking across to
the ' beautiful gate ' of St. Mary's ; and on
whose books were entered the names of most
of the good men belonging to the upper table
and its set, who had passed through Christ
Church for the last ten or twelve years.
237. Under these luxurious, and — in the
world's sight — honourable, conditions, my mind
gradually recovering its tranquillity and spring,
and making some daily, though infinitesimal,
progress towards the attainment of common
XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR. 323
sense, I believe that I did harder and better
work in my college reading than I can at all
remember. It seems to me now as if I had
known Thucydides, as I knew Homer (Pope's!),
since I could spell ; but the fact was, that for
a youth who had so little Greek to bless him-
self with at seventeen, to know every syllable
of his Thucydides at half past eighteen meant
some steady sitting at it. The perfect honesty
of the Greek soldier, his high breeding, his
political insight, and the scorn of construction
with which he knotted his meaning into a
rhythmic strength that writhed and wrought
every way at once, all interested me intensely
in him as a writer; while his subject, the
central tragedy of all the world, the suicide
of Greece, was felt by me with a sympathy
in which the best powers of my heart and
brain were brought up to their fullest, for
my years.
I open, and lay beside me as I write, the
perfectly clean and well - preserved third
volume of Arnold, over which I spent so much
toil, and burnt with such sorrow ; my close-
written abstracts still dovetailed into its pages ;
and read with surprised gratitude the editor's
324 PRi^TERITA.
final sentence in the preface dated ' Fox How,
Ambleside, January, 1835.'
"Not the wildest extravagance of atheistic
wickedness in modern times can go further
than the sophists of Greece went before them.
Whatever audacity can dare, and subtlety
contrive, to make the words 'good' and 'evil'
change their meaning, has been already tried
in the days of Plato, and by his eloquence,
and wisdom, and faith unshaken, put to
shame."
CHAPTER XII.
ROSLYN CHAPEL.
238. I MUST yet return, before closing the
broken record of these first twenty years, to
one or two scattered days in 1836, when
things happened which led forward into
phases of work to be given account of in
next volume.
I cannot find the date of my father's buying
his first Copley Fielding, — ' Between King's
House and Inveroran, Argyllshire.' It cost a
tremendous sum, for us — forty-seven guineas ;
and the day it came home was a festa, and
many a day after, in looking at it, and fancy-
ing the hills and the rain were real.
My father and I were in absolute sympathy
about Copley Fielding, and I could find it in
my heart now to wish I had lived at the
Land's End, and never seen any art but
Prout's and his. We were very much set up
at making his acquaintance, and then very
325
3 26 PRiETERITA.
happy in it : the modestest of presidents he
was ; the simplest of painters, without a
vestige of romance, but the purest love of daily
sunshine and the constant hills. Fancy him,
while Stanfield and Harding and Roberts
were grand-touring in Italy, and Sicily, and
Stiria, and Bohemia, and Illyria, and the Alps,
and the Pyrenees, and the Sierra Morena, —
Fielding never crossing to Calais, but year
after year returning to Saddleback and Ben
Venue, or, less ambitious yet, to Sandgate
and the Sussex Downs.
239. The drawings I made in 1835 were
really interesting even to artists, and ap-
peared promising enough to my father to justify
him in promoting me from Mr. Runciman's
tutelage to the higher privileges of art-instruc-
tion. Lessons from any of the members of
the Water-Colour Society cost a guinea, and
six were supposed to have efficiency for the
production of an adequately skilled water-
colour amateur. There was, of course, no
question by what master they should be given ;
and I know not whether papa or I most en-
joyed the six hours in Newman Street : my
father's intense delight in Fielding's work
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. $27
making it a real pleasure to the painter that
he should stay chatting while I had my lesson.
Nor was my father's talk (if he could be got
to talk) unworthy any painter's attention,
though he never put out his strength but in
writing. I chance in good time on a letter
from Northcote in 1830, showing how much
value the old painter put on my father's judg-
ment of a piece of literary work which remains
classical to this day, and is indeed the best
piece of existing criticism founded on the
principles of Sir Joshua's school :
240. 'DEAR Sir, — I received your most
kind and consoling letter, yet I was very sorry
to find you had been so ill, but hope you
have now recovered your health. The praise
you are so good as to bestow on me and
the Volume of Conversations gives me more
pleasure than perhaps you apprehend, as the
book was published against my consent, and,
in its first appearance in the magazines, totally
without my knowledge. I have done all in
my power to prevent its coming before the
public, because there are several hard and
cruel opinions of persons that I would not
328
PRJETERITA.
have them see in a printed book ; besides that,
Hazlitt, although a man of real abilities, yet
had a desire to give pain to others, and has
also frequently exaggerated that which I had
said in confidence to him. However, I thank
God that this book, which made me tremble at
its coming before the world, is received with
Qi-y
unexpected favour A to my part, and the
approbation of a mind like yours give {sic —
short for " cannot but give ") me the greatest
consolation I can receive, and sets my mind
more at ease.
' Please to present my respectful compli-
ments to Mrs. Ruskin, who I hope is well,
and kind remembrances to your son.
' I remain always, dear Sir,
• Your most obliged friend *
'And very humble servant,
'James Northcote.
'Argyll House,
' October \2>th, 1830.
' To John J. Ruskin, Esq.'
* In memory of the quiet old man who thus honoured us
with his friendship, and in most true sense of their value, I
hope to reprint the parts of the Conversations which I think
he would have wished to be preserved.
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 329
241. And thus the proposed six lessons in
Newman Street ran on into perhaps eight or
nine, during which Copley Fielding taught me
to wash colour smoothly in successive tints, to
shade cobalt through pink madder into yellow
ochre for skies, to use a broken scraggy touch
for the tops of mountains, to represent calm
lakes by broad strips of shade with lines of
light between them (usually at about the
distance of the lines of this print), to produce
dark clouds and rain with twelve or twenty
successive washes, and to crumble burnt
umber with a dry brush for foliage and fore-
ground. With these instructions, I succeeded
in copying a drawing which Fielding made
before me, some twelve inches by nine, of
Ben Venue and the Trosachs, with brown
cows standing in Loch Achray, so much to
my own satisfaction that I put my work up
over my bedroom chimney-piece the last thing
at night, and woke to its contemplation in the
morning with a rapture, mixed of self-com-
placency and the sense of new faculty, in
which I floated all that day, as in a newly-dis-
covered and strongly buoyant species of air.
In a very little while, however, I found that
3 3° PR^ETERITA.
this great first step did not mean consistent pro-
gress at the same pace. I saw that my washes,
however careful or multitudinous, did not in
the end look as smooth as Fielding's, and that
my crumblings of burnt umber became uninte-
resting after a certain number of repetitions.
With still greater discouragement, I per-
ceived the Fielding processes to be inappli-
cable to the Alps. My scraggy touches did
not to my satisfaction represent aiguilles, nor
my ruled lines of shade, the Lake of Geneva.
The water-colour drawing was abandoned,
with a dim under-current of feeling that I had
no gift for it, — and in truth I had none for
colour arrangement, — and the pencil outline
returned to with resolute energy.
242. I had never, up to this time, seen a
Turner drawing, and scarcely know whether
to lay to the score of dulness, or prudence,
the tranquillity in which I copied the engrav-
ings of the Rogers vignettes, without so much
as once asking where the originals were. The
facts being that they lay at the bottom of an
old drawer in Queen Anne Street, inaccessible
to me as the bottom of the sea, — and that,
if I had seen them, they would only have
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 33 I
destroyed my pleasure in the engravings,—
my rest in these was at least fortunate : and
the more I consider of this and other such
forms of failure in what most people would
call laudable curiosity, the more I am disposed
to regard with thankfulness, and even respect,
the habits which have remained with me
during life, of always working resignedly at
the thing under my hand till I could do it,
and looking exclusively at the thing before
my eyes till I could see it.
On the other hand, the Academy Turners
were too far beyond all hope of imitation to
disturb me, and the impressions they produced
before 1836 were confused; many of them,
like the Quilleboeuf, or- the ' Keelmen heaving
in coals,' being of little charm in colour; and
the Fountain of Indolence, or Golden Bough,
perhaps seeming to me already fantastic, beside
the naturalism of Landseer, and the human in-
terest and intelligible finish of Wilkie.
243. But in 1836 Turner exhibited three
pictures, in which the characteristics of his
later manner were developed with his best
skill and enthusiasm : Juliet and her Nurse,
Rome from Mount Aventine, and Mercury and
3 3 2 PR.ETERITA.
Argus. His freak in placing Juliet at Venice
instead of Verona, and the mysteries of lamp-
light and rockets with which he had disguised
Venice herself, gave occasion to an article in
Blackwood's Magazine of sufficiently telling
ribaldry, expressing, with some force, and ex-
treme discourtesy, the feelings of the pupils of
Sir George Beaumont at the appearance of
these unaccredited views of Nature.
The review raised me to the height of
'black anger' in which I have remained pretty
nearly ever since ; and having by that time
some confidence in my power of words, and — "
not merely judgment, but sincere experience —
of the charm of Turner's work, I wrote an
answer to Blackwood, of which I wish I could
now find any fragment. But my father
thought it right to ask Turner's leave for its
publication ; it was copied in my best hand ;
and sent to Queen Anne Street, and the old
man returned kindly answer, as follows : —
'47, Queen Ann (sic) Street West,
« October 6t/i. 1836.
'My DEAR Sir, — I beg to thank you for
your zeal, kindness, and the trouble you have
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 3 33
taken in my behalf, in regard of the criticism
of Blackwood's Magazine for October, respect-
ing my works ; but I never move in these
matters, they are of no import save mischief
and the meal tub, which Maga fears for by
my having invaded the flour tub.
' P.S. — If you wish to have the manuscript
back, have the goodness to let me know. If
not, with your sanction, I will send it on to
the possessor of the picture of Juliet.'
I cannot give the signature of this letter,
which has been cut off for some friend ! In
later years it used to be, to my father, ' Yours
most truly/ and to me, ' Yours truly.'
The ' possessor of the picture ' was Mr.
Munro of Novar, who never spoke to me of
the first chapter of ' Modern Painters ' thus
coming into his hands. Nor did I ever care
to ask him about it ; and still, for a year or
two longer, I persevered in the study of
Turner engravings only, and the use of Copley
Fielding's method for such efforts at colour
as I made on the vacation journeys during
Oxford days.
244. We made three tours in those
334 pRjETErita.
summers, without crossing Channel. In 1837,
to Yoikshire and the Lakes ; in 1838, to Scot-
land ; in 1839, to Cornwall.
On the journey of 1837, when I was
eighteen, I felt, for the last time, the pure
childish love of nature which Wordsworth so
idly takes for an intimation of immortality.
We went down by the North Road, as usual ;
and on the fourth day arrived at Catterick
Bridge, where there is a clear pebble-bedded
stream, and both west and east some rising
of hills, foretelling the moorlands and dells of
upland Yorkshire ; and there the feeling came
back to me — as it could never return more.
It is a feeling only possible to youth, for
all care, regret, or knowledge of evil destroys
it ; and it requires also the full sensibility of
nerve and blood, the conscious strength of
heart, and hope; not but that I suppose the
purity of youth may feel what is best of it
even through sickness and the waiting for
death ; but only in thinking death itself God's
sending.
245. In myself, it has always been quite
exclusively confined to wild, that is to say,
wholly natural places, and especially to scenery
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL.
335
animated by streams, or by the sea. The
sense of the freedom, spontaneous, unpolluted
power of nature was essential in it. I enjoyed
a lawn, a garden, a daisied field, a quiet pond,
as other children do; but by the side of
Wandel, or on the downs of Sandgate, or by
a Yorkshire stream under a cliff, I was dif-
ferent from other children, that ever I have
noticed: but the feeling cannot be described
by any of us that have it. Wordsworth's
1 haunted me like a passion ' is no description
of it, for it is not like, but is, a passion ; the
point is to define how it differs from other
passions, — what sort of human, pre-eminently
human, feeling it is that loves a stone for a
stone's sake, and a cloud for a cloud's. A
monkey loves a monkey for a monkey's sake,
and a nut for the kernel's, but not a stone for
a stone's. I took stones for bread, but not
certainly at the Devil's bidding.
I was different, be it once more said, from
other children even of my own type, not so
much in the actual nature of the feeling, but
in the mixture of it. I had, in my little clay
pitcher, vialfuls, as it were, of Wordsworth's
reverence, Shelley's sensitiveness, Turner's
336 PRJETERITA.
\1 accuracy, all in one. A snowdrop was to me,
1 as to Wordsworth, part of the Sermon on the
mount ; but I never should have written
sonnets to the celandine, because it is of a
coarse yellow, and imperfect form. With
Shelley, I loved blue sky and blue eyes, but
never in the least confused the heavens with
my own poor little Psychidion. And the
reverence and passion were alike kept in
their places by the constructive Turnerian
element ; and I did not weary myself in wish-
ing that a daisy could see the beauty of its
shadow, but in trying to draw the shadow
rightly, myself.
246. But so stubborn and chemically in-
alterable the laws of the prescription were,
that now, looking back from 1886 to that
brook shore of 1837, whence I could see the
whole of my youth, I find myself in nothing
whatsoever changed. Some of me is dead,
more of me stronger. I have learned a few
things, forgotten many ; in the total of me,
I am but the same youth, disappointed and
rheumatic.
And in illustration of this stubbornness, not
by stiffening of the wood with age, but in the
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 337
structure of the pith, let me insist a minute
or two more on the curious joy I felt in 1837
in returning to the haunts of boyhood. No
boy could possibly have been more excited
than I was by seeing Italy and the Alps ;
neither boy nor man ever knew better the
difference between a Cumberland cottage and
Venetian palace, or a Cumberland stream and
the Rhone : — my very knowledge of this dif-
ference will be found next year expressing
itself in the first bit of promising literary
work I ever did; but, after all the furious
excitement and wild joy of the Continent, the
coming back to a Yorkshire streamside felt
like returning to heaven. We went on into
well known Cumberland ; my father took me
up Scawfell and Helvellyn, with a clever
Keswick guide, who knew mineralogy, Mr.
Wright ; and the summer passed beneficently
and peacefully.
247. A little incident which happened, I
fancy in the beginning of '38, shows that I
had thus recovered some tranquillity and
sense, and might at that time have been
settled down to simple and healthy life, easily
enough, had my parents seen the chance.
vol. 1. Y
338 PRiETERITA.
I forgot to say, when speaking of Mr. and
Mrs. Richard Gray, that, when I was a child,
my mother had another religious friend, who
lived just at the top of Camberwell Grove,
or between it and the White Gate, — Mrs.
Withers ; an extremely amiable and charitable
person, with whom my mother organized, I
imagine, such schemes of almsgiving as her
own housekeeping prevented her seeing to
herself. Mr. Withers was a coal-merchant,
ultimately not a successful one. Of him I
remember only a reddish and rather vacant
face ; of Mrs. Withers, no material aspect,
only the above vague but certain facts; and
that she was a familiar element in my mother's
life, dying out of it however without much
notice or miss, before I was old enough to
get any clear notion of her.
In this spring of '38, however, the widowed
Mr. Withers, having by that time retired to
the rural districts in reduced circumstances,
came up to town on some small vestige of
carboniferous business, bringing his only
daughter with him to show my mother; —
who, for a wonder, asked her to stay with
us, while her father visited his umquwhile
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 3 39
clientage at the coal-wharves. Charlotte
Withers was a fragile, fair, freckled, sensitive
slip of a girl about sixteen ; graceful in an
unfinished and small wild-flower sort of a
way, extremely intelligent, affectionate, wholly
right-minded, and mild in piety. An alto-
gether sweet and delicate creature of ordinary
sort, not pretty, but quite pleasant to see,
especially if her eyes were looking your way,
and her mind with them.
248. We got to like each other in a mildly
confidential way in the course of a week.
We disputed on the relative dignities of music
and painting; and I wrote an essay nine
foolscap pages long, proposing the entire
establishment of my own opinions, and the
total discomfiture and overthrow of hers, ac-
cording to my usual manner of paying court
to my mistresses. Charlotte Withers, how-
ever, thought I did her great honour, and
carried away the essay as if it had been a
school prize.
And, as I said, if my father and mother had
chosen to keep her a month longer, we should
have fallen quite melodiously and quietly in
love ; and they might have given rae an
34Q
PR^-.TERITA.
excellently pleasant little wife, and set me up,
geology and all, in the coal business, without
any resistance or farther trouble on my part.
I don't suppose the idea ever occurred to
them ; Charlotte was not the kind of person
they proposed for me. So Charlotte went
away at the week's end, when her father was
ready for her. I walked with her to Camber-
well Green, and we said good-bye, rather
sorrowfully, at the corner of the New Road ;
and that possibility of meek happiness van-
ished for ever. A little while afterwards, her
father ' negotiated ' a marriage for her with a
well-to-do Newcastle trader, whom she took
because she was bid. He treated her pretty
much as one of his coal sacks, and in a year
or two she died.
249. Very dimly, and rather against my
own will, the incident showed me what my
mother had once or twice observed to me, to
my immense indignation, that Adele was not
the only girl in the world ; and my enjoyment
of our tour in the Trosachs was not described
in any more Byronian heroics ; the tragedy
also having been given up, because, when I
had described a gondola, a bravo, the heroine
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 34 l
Bianca, and moonlight on the Grand Canal,
I found I had not much more to say.
Scott's country took me at last well out of
it all. It is of little use to the reader now
to tell him that still at that date the shore
of Loch Katrine, at the east extremity of the
lake, was exactly as Scott had seen it, and
described,
' Onward, amid the copse 'gan peep,
A narrow inlet, still and deep.'
In literal and lovely truth, that was so : — by
the side of the footpath (it was no more)
which wound through the Trosachs, deep
and calm under the blaeberry bushes, a dark
winding clear-brown pool, not five feet wide
at first, reflected the entangled moss of its
margin, and arch of branches above, with
scarcely a gleam of sky.
That inlet of Loch Katrine was in itself an
extremely rare thing; I have never myself
seen the like of it in lake shores. A winding
recess of deep water, without any entering
stream to account for it — possible only, I
imagine, among rocks of the quite abnormal
confusion of the Trosachs; and besides the
natural sweetness and wonder of it, made
3 4 2 PR^TERITA.
sacred by the most beautiful poem that Scot-
land ever sang by her stream sides. And all
that the nineteenth century conceived of wise
and right to do with this piece of mountain
inheritance, was to thrust the nose of a
steamer into it, plank its blaeberries over with
a platform, and drive the populace headlong
past it as fast as they can scuffle.
It had been well for me if I had climbed
Ben Venue and Ben Ledi, hammer in hand,
as Scawfell and Helvellyn. But I had given
myself some literary work instead, to which
I was farther urged by the sight of Roslyn
and Melrose.
250. The idea had come into my head in
the summer of '37, and, I imagine, rose imme-
diately out of my sense of the contrast between
the cottages of Westmoreland and those of
Italy. Anyhow, the November number of
Loudon's Architectural Magazine for 1837
opens with ' Introduction to the Poetry of
Architecture ; or, The Architecture of the
Nations of Europe considered in its Asso-
ciation with Natural Scenery and National
Character,' by Kataphusin. I could not have
put in fewer, or more inclusive words, the
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 343
definition of what half nay future life was to
be spent in discoursing of; while the nom-de-
plume I chose, 'According to Nature/ was
equally expressive of the temper in which I
was to discourse alike on that and every other
subject. The adoption of a nom-de-plume at
all, implied (as also the concealment of name
on the first publication of ' Modern Painters ')
a sense of a power of judgment in myself,
which it would not have been becoming in a
youth of eighteen to claim..- Had either my
father or tutor then said to me, ' Write as it is
becoming in a youth to write, — let the reader
discover what you know, and be persuaded to
what you judge,' I perhaps might not now have
been ashamed of my youth's essays. Had
they said to me more sternly, ' Hold your
tongue till you need not ask the reader's con-
descension in listening to you,' I might per-
haps have been satisfied with my work when
it was mature.
As it is, these youthful essays, though
deformed by assumption, and shallow in
contents, are curiously right up to the points
they reach ; and already distinguished above
most of the literature of the time, for the skill
344
PRjETERITA.
of language which the public at once felt for
a pleasant gift in me.
251. I have above said that had it not been
for constant reading of the Bible, I might
probably have taken Johnson for my model of
English. To a useful extent I have always
done so; in these first essays, partly because
I could not help it, partly of set, and well set,
purpose.
On our foreign journeys, it being of course
desirable to keep the luggage as light as
possible, my father had judged that four
little volumes of Johnson — the Idler and the
Rambler — did, under names wholly appro-
priate to the circumstances, contain more
substantial literary nourishment than could
be, from any other author, packed into so
portable compass. And accordingly, in spare
hours, and on wet days, the turns and returns of
reiterated Rambler and iterated Idler fastened
themselves in my ears and mind ; nor was it
possible for me, till long afterwards, to quit
myself of Johnsonian symmetry and balance in
sentences intended, either with swordsman's or
paviour's blow, to cleave an enemy's crest, or
drive down the oaken pile of a principle. I
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 345
never for an instant compared Johnson to
Scott, Pope, Byron, or any of the really
great writers whom I loved. But I at once
and for ever recognized in him a man entirely
sincere, and infallibly wise in the view and
estimate he gave of the common questions,
business, and ways of the world. I valued
his sentences not primarily because they were
symmetrical, but because they were just, and
clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used
by the average public, who ask from an author
always, in the first place, arguments in favour
of their own opinions, in elegant terms ; and
are just as ready with their applause for a
sentence of Macaulay's, which may have no
more sense in it than a blot pinched between
doubled paper, as to reject one of Johnson's,
telling against their own prejudice, — though
its symmetry be as of thunder answering from
two horizons.
252. 1 hold it more than happy that, during
those continental journeys, in which the vivid
excitement of the greater part of the day left
me glad to give spare half-hours to the study
of a thoughtful book, Johnson was the one
author accessible to me. No other writer
346
PR/ETERITA.
could have secured me, as he did, against
all chance of being misled by my own san-
guine and metaphysical temperament. He
taught me carefully to measure life, and dis-
trust fortune ; and he secured me, by his
adamantine common -sense, for ever, from
being caught in the cobwebs of German meta-
physics, or sloughed in the English drainage
of them.
I open, at this moment, the larger of the
volumes of the Idler to which I owe so much.
After turning over a few leaves, I chance on
the closing sentence of No. 65, which tran-
scribing, I may show the reader in sum what
it taught me, — in words which, writing this
account of myself, I conclusively obey.
' Of these learned men, let those who aspire
to the same praise imitate the diligence, and
avoid the scrupulosity. Let it be always re-
membered that life is short, that knowledge
is endless, and that many doubts deserve not
to be cleared. Let those whom nature and
study have qualified to teach mankind, tell
us what they have learned while they are
yet able to tell it, and trust their reputation
only to themselves.'
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 347
It is impossible for me now to know how
far my own honest desire for truth, and com-
passionate sense of what is instantly helpful
to creatures who are every instant perishing,
might have brought me, in their own time,
to think and judge as Johnson thought and
measured, — even had I never learned of him.
He at least set me in the straight path from
the beginning, and, whatever time I might
waste in vain pleasure, or weak effort, he
saved me for ever from false thoughts and
futile speculations.
253. Why, I know not, for Mr. Loudon
was certainly not tired of me, the Kataphusin
papers close abruptly, as if their business was
at its natural end, without a word of allusion
in any part of them, or apology for the want
of allusion, to the higher forms of civil and
religious architecture. I find, indeed, a casual
indication of some ulterior purpose in a pon-
derous sentence of the paper on the West-
moreland cottage, announcing that ' it will be
seen hereafter, when we leave the lowly valley
for the torn ravine, and the grassy knoll for
the ribbed precipice, that if the continental
architects cannot adorn the pasture with the
34$ PRJETERITA.
humble roof, they can crest the crag with
eternal battlements.' But this magnificent
promise ends in nothing more tremendous
than a 'chapter on chimneys,' illustrated, as
I find this morning to my extreme surprise,
by a fairly good drawing of the building
which is now the principal feature in the view
from my study window, — Coniston Hall.
On the whole, however, these papers,
written at intervals during 1838, indicate a
fairly progressive and rightly consolidated
range of thought on these subjects, within the
chrysalid torpor of me.
254. From the Trosachs we drove to Edin-
burgh : and, somewhere on the road near
Linlithgow, my father, reading some letters
got by that day's post, coolly announced to
my mother and me that Mr. Domecq was
going to bring his four daughters to England
again, to finish their schooling at New Hall,
near Chelmsford.
And I am unconscious of anything more in
that journey, or of anything after it, until I
found myself driving down to Chelmsford.
My mother had no business of course to take
me with her to pay a visit in a convent ; but
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 349
I suppose felt it would be too cruel to leave
me behind. The young ladies were allowed
a chat with us in the parlour, and invited
(with acceptance) to spend their vacations
always at Heme Hill. And so began a
second aera of that part of my life which is
not ' worthy of memory,' but only of the
4 Guarda e Passa.'
There was some solace during my autumnal
studies in thinking that she was really in
England, really over there, — I could see the
sky over Chelmsford from my study window,
— and that she was shut up in a convent and
couldn't be seen by anybody, or spoken to,
but by nuns ; and that perhaps she wouldn't
quite like it, and would like to come to Heme
Hill again, and bear with me a little.
255. I wonder mightily now what sort of
a creature I should have turned out, if at this
time Love had been with me instead of
against me; and instead of the distracting
and useless pain, I had had the joy of ap-
proved love, and the untellable, incalculable
motive of its sympathy and praise.
It seems to me such things are not allowed
in this world. The men capable of the
3 5 O PRJETERITA.
highest imaginative passion are always tossed
on fiery waves by it : the men who find it
smooth water, and not scalding, are of another
sort. My father's second clerk, Mr. Ritchie,
wrote unfeelingly to his colleague, bachelor
Henry, who would not marry for his mother's
and sister's sakes, " If you want to know
what happiness is, get a wife, and half a
dozen children, and come to Margate." But
Mr. Ritchie remained all his life nothing more
than a portly gentleman with gooseberry eyes,
of the Irvingite persuasion.
There must be great happiness in the love-
matches of the typical English squire. Yet
English squires make their happy lives only
a portion for foxes.
256. Of course, when Adele and her sisters
came back at Christmas, and stayed with us
four or five weeks, every feeling and folly
that had been subdued or forgotten, returned
in redoubled force. I don't know what would
have happened if Adele had been a perfectly
beautiful and amiable girl, and had herself in
the least liked me. I suppose then my
mother would have been overcome. But
though extremely lovely at fifteen, Adele was
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 3 5 I
not prettier than French girls in general at
eighteen; she was firm, and fiery, and high
principled; but, as the light traits already
noticed of her enough show, not in the least
amiable; and although she would have mar-
ried me, had her father wished it, was always
glad to have me out of her way. My love
was much too high and fantastic to be di-
minished by her loss of beauty; but I per-
fectly well saw and admitted it, having never
at any time been in the slightest degree
blinded by love, as I perceive other men are,
out of my critic nature. And day followed
on day, and month to month, of complex
absurdity, pain, error, wasted affection, and
rewardless semi-virtue, which I am content
to sweep out of the way of what better things
I can recollect at this time, into the smallest
possible size of dust heap, and wish the
Dustman Oblivion good clearance of them.
With this one general note, concerning
children's conduct to their parents, that a
great quantity of external and irksome obedi-
ence may be shown them, which virtually
is no obedience, because it is not cheerful
and total. The wish to disobey is already
3 52 PR.ETERITA.
disobedience ; and although at this time I was
really doing a great many things I did not
like, to please my parents, I have not now
one self-approving thought or consolation in
having done so, so much did its sullenness and
maimedness pollute the meagre sacrifice.
257. But, before I quit, for this time, the
field of romance, let me write the epitaph of
one of its sweet shadows, which some who
knew the shadow may be glad I should write.
The ground floor, under my father's counting-
house at Billiter Street, I have already said
was occupied by Messrs. Wardell & Co. The
head of this firm was an extremely intelligent
and refined elderly gentleman, darkish, with
spiritedly curling and projecting dark hair,
and bright eyes ; good-natured and amiable in
a high degree, well educated, not over wise,
alwaj's well pleased with himself, happy in
a sensible wife, and a very beautiful, and
entirely gentle and good, only daughter. Not
over wise, I repeat, but an excellent man of
business ; older, and, I suppose, already con-
siderably richer, than my father. He had a
handsome house at Hampstead, and spared no
pains on his daughter's education.
«
51
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 3 5 3
It must have been some time about this
year 1839, or the previous one, that my father
having been deploring to Mr. Wardell the
discomfortable state of mind I had got into
about Adele, Mr. Wardell proposed to him
to try whether some slight diversion of my
thoughts might not be effected by a visit to
Hampstead. My father's fancy was still set
on Lady Clara Vere de Vere; but Miss
Wardell was everything that a girl should be,
and an heiress, — of perhaps something more
than my own fortune was likely to come to.
And the two fathers agreed that nothing could
be more fit, rational, and desirable, than such
an arrangement. So I was sent to pass a
summer afternoon, and dine at Hampstead.
258. It would have been an extremely
delightful afternoon for any youth not a
simpleton. Miss Wardell had often enough
heard me spoken of by her father as a well-
conducted 3'outh, already of some literary
reputation — author of the ' Poetry of Architec-
ture ' — winner of the Newdigate, — First class
man in expectation. She herself had been
brought up in a way closely resembling my
own, in severe seclusion by devoted parents,
vol. 1. z
3 54 PRiETERITA.
at a suburban villa with a pretty garden, to
skip, and gather flowers, in. The chief dif-
ference was that, from the first, Miss Wardell
had had excellent masters, and was now an
extremely accomplished, intelligent, and fault-
less maid of seventeen ; fragile and delicate
to a degree enhancing her beauty with some
solemnity of fear, yet in perfect health, as far as
a fast-growing girl could be ; a softly moulded
slender brunette, with her father's dark curl-
ing hair transfigured into playful grace round
the pretty, modest, not unthoughtful, gray-
eyed face. Of the afternoon at Hampstead,
1 remember only that it was a fine day, and
that we walked in the garden ; mamma, as her
mere duty to me in politeness at a first visit,
superintending, — it would have been wiser to
have left us to get on how we could. I very
heartily and reverently admired the pretty
creature, and would fain have done, or said,
anything I could to please her. Literally to
please her, for that is, indeed, my hope with i
all girls, in spite of what I have above related
of my mistaken ways of recommending myself.
My primary thought is how to serve them,
and make them happy, and if they could use
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 3 5 5
me for a plank bridge over a stream, or set
me up for a post to tie a swing to, or anything
of the sort not requiring me to talk, I should
be always quite happy in such promotion.
This sincere devotion to them, with intense
delight in whatever beauty or grace they
chance to have, and in most cases, perceptive
sympathy, heightened by faith in their right
feelings, for the most part gives me consider-
able power with girls : but all this prevents
me from ever being in the least at ease with
them, — and I have no doubt that during the
whole afternoon at Hampstead, I gave little
pleasure to my companion. For the rest,
though I extremely admired Miss Wardell,
she was not my sort of beauty. I like oval
j faces, crystalline blonde, with straightish, at
i the utmost wavy, (or, in length, wreathed)
t hair, and the form elastic, and foot firm.
j Miss Wardell's dark and tender grace had
n no power over me, except to make me ex-
c tremely afraid of being tiresome to her. On
Ci the whole, I suppose I came off pretty well, for
__ she afterwards allowed herself to be brought
5l out to Heme Hill to see the pictures, and
so on ; and I recollect her looking a little
3 5^ PRiETERlTA.
frightenedly pleased at my kneeling down to
hold a book for her, or some such matter.
259. After this second interview, however,
my father and mother asking me seriously
what I thought of her, and I explaining to
them that though I saw all her beauty, and
merit, and niceness, she yet was not my sort
of girl, — the negotiations went no farther at
that time, and a little while after, were ended
for all time ; for at Hampstead they went on
teaching the tender creature High German,
and French of Paris, and Kant's Metaphysics,
and Newton's Principia ; and then they took
her to Paris, and tired her out with seeing
everything every day, all day long, besides the
dazzle and excitement of such a first outing
from Hampstead ; and she at last getting too
pale and weak, they brought her back to
some English seaside place, I forget where :
and there she fell into nervous fever and
faded away, with the light of death flickering
clearer and clearer in her soft eyes, and never
skipped in Hampstead garden more.
How the parents, especially the father,
lived on, I never could understand ; but I
suppose they were honestly religious without
XII. ROSLYN CHAPEL. 3 57
talking of it, and they had nothing to blame
themselves in, except not having known
better. The father, though with grave lines
altering his face for ever, went steadily on
with his business, and lived to be old.
260. I cannot be sure of the date of either
Miss Withers' or Miss Wardell's death ; that
of Sybilla Dowie (told in Fors), more sad
than either, was much later ; but the loss
of her sweet spirit, following her lover's, had
been felt by us before the time of which I am
now writing. I had never myself seen Death,
nor had an}' part in the grief or anxiety of a
sick chamber; nor had I ever seen, far less
conceived, the misery of unaided poverty.
But I had been made to think of it ; and in
the deaths of the creatures whom I had reen
joyful, the sense of deep pity, not sorrow for
myself, but for them, began to mingle with all ;
the thoughts, which, founded on the Homeric,
./Eschylean, and Shakespearian tragedy, had
now begun to modify the untried faith of
childhood. The blue of the mountains be-
came deep to me with the purple of mourning,
— the clouds that gather round the setting
51m, not subdued, but raised in awe as the
3 5 8 PR^TERITA.
harmonies of a Miserere, — and all the strength
and framework of my mind, lurid, like the
vaults of Roslyn, when weird fire gleamed
on its pillars, foliage-bound, and far in the
depth of twilight, ' blazed every rose-carved
buttress fair.'
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